I have, finally, managed to boot Knoppix 3.7 on my little Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE. It wasn't easy and it wasn't pretty.

Basically what I had to do was download a copy of GRUB4DOS (which I found a link to in an article about the Poor Man's Install on the wiki pages). The article was actually about booting from an NTFS partition but I ignored that part.

I took the files grub.exe and menu.lst and put them into C:\.

I then modified config.sys and autoexec.bat so that I had a GRUB boot menu item that would run grub.exe with the (modified) parameters in menu.lst. I also copied linux24 and minirt24.gz into C:\.

I rebooted and chose the GRUB option from my boot menu and it worked!! (It found KNOPPIX on my D: drive -- which came up as /dev/hda5 for some reason). It even automounts my Easydisk USB key (as /dev/sdb1) correctly.

It wasn't a perfect setup by any means but at least now I'm out of that chicken-and-egg situation of needing linux to install linux that I was in before.

Things I need to look at:-

1. Knoppix is searching for lots and lots of scsi devices before finding /dev/hda5 -- I think I can speed that up by tuning the options in menu.lst.
2. I haven't got the built-in camera to work yet.
3. I had to setup a knoppix.swp file in C:\ before I could run some of the larger apps (Like KStars). I need to sort out an automatic swapon for that or maybe a proper swap partition.
4. I need to look at creating a persistent home directory for the knoppix user (and also whether I want to move KNOPPIX somewhere else; at present both hda1 and hda5 get automounted as read-only).
5. I might even do a proper install next. Perhaps ditch WinME... Need to make sure I can still use the modem/network card first.
6. I need to sort out X so it displays at 1024x480 rather than the 640x480 its doing right now (I have very fat penguins).

Thanks for the advice and hints via email and on here. If anyone wants more detail then send me an email and I'll try to answer if I can.

All the best, Alan