Does knoppix mount the filesystems from some location other than /etc/fstab?
Well, yes and no.

Knoppix actually rewrites /etc/fstab while the computer is booting. You can see when this happens - a line is written to the screen in blue and yellow that says,
Code:
Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab...
If it goes by too fast, you can review the boot process by typing
Code:
$ dmesg
This behavior is a good thing when running from CD, because the disk never knows from one boot to the next what environment it will find. It's probably not that useful after installation to HD, and can be downright annoying in situations like yours.

True to the Unix Way, there are different options for dealing with this default behavior. The easiest is probably to give the Knoppix parameter nofstab at boot time. You can do it each and every time you want to skip the rewrite or, if you're using a bootloader, add a line like this:
Code:
append="nofstab"
If there's already an append line, just add to it:
Code:
append="lang=us nofstab"
Note that this isn't a kernel parameter - it's specific to Knoppix. So it won't work if you do a Debian install. Of course, it won't be needed if you do a Debian install.

Other ways involve modifying the script that carries out the procedure, and aren't hard at all. Do this by editing (as root) /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig. On my system there are 12 lines of code starting at line 951 (or search for nofstab). The file has useful comments inside, so it's easy to see what it does.

You can comment these lines out by adding # at the beginning of each one. (Well, two of the lines are already just comments, so you'd do that to the other 10.) Or you could add a test for HD-install - the script already does that for other actions, so you could browse through the file and see how it's done elsewhere.

Still other ways might be to have the boot process skip this whole script entirely, or put something else in its place. Whatever gets you down the road.

I hope this helps!

-- Ed