Just picked up a Knoppix CDrom and have been booting it on a variety of old computers.
Toshiba 2755 laptop - had to use the "acpi=off" and settle for the small 640x480 screen.
Dell desktop - can't boot Knoppix normal. Tried with "failsafe" and it gets to the part about the drives and things seem to look ok, and then it starts slow scroll/loop with : hdb Lost Interrupt. We have this Dell configued with 4 internal IDE devices:
hda=hard disk hdb=ZIP drive hdc=CDrom hdd=tape backup
So, it seems to be complaining about the internal IDE ZIP drive. The drive works fine under windows. any ideas ?

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