I know this thread is old, but I've just come across the same problem.

Running Knoppix CD 4.0.2 on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6000, it hangs with the message about 'creating fstab'. In failsafe mode, it hangs trying to run fdisk.

If I use Knoppix 3.6, it creates an fstab that includes:

/dev/hda /mnt/hda auto noauto,users,exec 0 0

Note that's /dev/hda, NOT /dev/hda1. If I try

mount /dev/hda

I get

FAT: bogus logical sector size

(it's an NTFS disk). Now fdisk gives

/dev/hda1 * 1 4864 39870048+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

which looks reasonable. I tried

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda

and got

mount: error while guessing filesystem type
HDA1: bad access: block=0, count=1
etc.

smartctl thinks the disk is OK.

The only reason I'm running Knoppix on this PC is to check the hard drive, because XP seems slow, but I mention it here because it seems to be an ongoing issue with Knoppix

regards

Chris