I have exactly the same problem. I have downloaded Knoppix and also copied from an origional cd. Makes no difference. However it only seem to happen on a DELL 2650 with dual Xeon CPUs. It does come up with another error just before is freezes on the eata.o message. "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC" means nothing to me.

The same disk works fine on a Acer Veriton 5200 and 5100.