I'm pretty used to computers (how many times do you hear people say that right before dropping a big load of DUH all over? ), so one day I lost an HD partition and then I realized the value of having something bootable on hand to diagnose and recover files. After I got that problem fixed, I acted on a friend's recommendation to get Knoppix on hand before the next big problem happened. So...I downloaded 3.7, checked the MD5 and burned a CD from the ISO. My computer is definitely set up to boot from CD, which it did. It gave me the boot prompt; I pressed ENTER, and then...

A penguin. All by himself. He looked kind of lonely, sitting there in the upper left-hand corner of my screen, so I thought maybe if I waited a while his friends would show up. They did no such thing, and hence after ten minutes of that poor penguin sitting by himself, I reset the computer and decided to try some other things from the boot prompt. Memtest seems to not load completely (it freezes after figuring out that I have a VIA bridge), and the "expert" command gave me a bunch of bootup text ending with pty 256 Unix98 ptys configured and a blinking cursor. Numlock and Capslock do not respond, and I don't know key combos to do stuff in Linux or Knoppix, but random stuff like the three-fingered salute, ESC, CTRL-C, etc, did nothing.

My computer is an AMD Athlon 1.2 ghz on an ASUS a7v133 mobo, which uses the VIA KT133 chipset. Graphics: Visiontek Geforce TI4200. PS/2 kb and mouse. Sound: SB Live! 5.1 Gamer (That exclamation point gets on my nerves. It really makes it look like it should be the end of the sentence. As in, "Soundblaster Live! <PAUSE> 5.1 Gamer...") HD: IDE, Samsung 160GB and an IBM 16GB. Atapi DVD/CD Writer combo from LG. No modem. USB Devices: Belkin wireless network card, a power station, a USB reading lamp. This computer incidentally runs Windows 2000 rather well, as well as Win98, Various varieties of DOS, etc. Microsoft loves it, why can't the penguin get along with it? *sniff*...

I searched through the forums but that lonely penguin really does seem to be all by himself...can you help him get some friends? Thanks,

-- Joren