The HD Install HOWTO says "Be sure the root partition is the first partition on the drive, is formatted with ext2 or ext3." Is this correct?
No, that surely isn't true. Here's my setup:

Code:
root@charlie:~# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 9042 MB, 9042001920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1099 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         382     3068383+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2             383         446      514080   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3             447        1099     5245222+  83  Linux
I don't know, but it was probably correct when that WiKi entry was written? (It mentions Knoppix 3.4...)