Quote Originally Posted by kynn
All I know is that if I restart the machine (either by selecting "Restart" from the "Start->Shut Down" menu, or selecting "Shut down" followed by restarting the machine), I never see the Knoppix screen come up; instead, I see the usual Windows 98 start up sequence. I do hear noises coming from the CD-ROM drive right before the Windows 98 start up sequence kicks in, suggesting that the machine is aware of the CD-ROM drive, but nothing comes of it.
Have you looked at your BIOS settings to see if the BIOS does not have a setting to let you boot from CD before hard disk or floppy? Do you know that the CD was burnt correctly and at low speed? A CD burnt the wrong way (not from the ISO image but rather just putting the ISO on a CD, for example) or burnt from an ISO with a bad MD5 sum will not boot, in pretty much the way you describe here. I've also seen that many time CD's burnt with the proper procedure but burnt at high speed will boot in some systems but not others, the "fix" is to burn the CD with the proper procedure at a low speed like 4x (or even better use a 700 meg CDRW so that if you have other problems the disk is not wasted). Based on the age of that Dell system it should boot a CD.