Hi Harry. Thanks for the sympathy on my illness. I merely mentioned it, not because I wanted or expected sympathy, but because I wanted to impress on readers the urgency of my request. Oh why did I bother? Anyway Harry, heartless world or not, I did state in my plea for help that I had obtained the Knoppix Live CD. I bought it professionally produced(is that the correct term?) and paid for. No download. No burning. No missed or corrupted files.
Anyway Harry, since then I have tried again and this time I booted up and entered 'Failsafe'. This time everything loaded in onto my system, in a few seconds at most. I was presented with a lovely desktop and all the relevant screens, etc, BUT.....no mouse. The mouse pointer was on screen, but inopperative. This obviosly was not the way to boot the CD.
So back to the original boot again and sure enough the boot begins but stops, telling me that it is looking for CDROM in /dev/hdb.
Thanks for reading so far. Grandad Walt.