boot from .msi image ??????

[Harry Kuhman]

once these machines have booted to winXP, the CD Drive (D, claims to have no CD in them ( please insert CD in drive)

could it be that these CD Drives cant read CD-R ? ( i have run CD-R in them both before, but only after windows boots to desktop.

Well, the 64 meg system might be a bit tight on memory for Knoppix (I would think it's tight on memory for XP too), and it could want to create a swap file but be unable to do so because of the NTFS partitions. But even if that is the case you would expect to see the CD from inside windows.

You would also expect to see it on the 512 meg system.

I wold try booting into Windows and then inserting the CD to see if you can read the CD.

If these systems just can't read the CD then that certainly explains why they can'y boot the CD. Why they can't read the CD I don't know. Even though you reported that the system that burnt it can read it, can it still read it (after a reboot)? Did you try booting Knoppix on the system that can read the CD?

I don't know Alcohol, but are you sure that you burned the CD at 4x? Did it take about 20 minutes to make the CD (plus any time it took to verify the data)?

You certainly have some clues to help you track this down. I don't know if it's that both of those drives are having problems reading a good CD, or if the CD isn't quite right, or if it's really bad and the Alcohol system was playing mind games with you. But you should be able to determine where the problem is if Windows can't even see the CD.

or do i not understand the "set to boot from CD"

That's the BIOS setting, sounds like it's correct for you. Some very old BIOSs (like what might be in that 64 meg system) had the option to boot from CD but couldn't quite boot some CDs properly. If that is the case, the program Smart Boot Manager can boot the CD for you and get past any BIOS issues. But if you can't even see the CD when you boot Windows (put the CD in after Windows comes up from a cold boot), then SBM isn't going to help.

or what you mean by CD autorun ?.

Windows has a feature that can detect when a CD has been inderted into the drive and will run "something" when the CD is inserted. If this feature is enabled (the default) then for a data disc it looks on the CD for a file called autorun.inf and take instructions from there for what program to run when the CD is inserted, what icon to display for the CD and so on. It is seeing the autorun.ini file and the instructions that are inside it that causes the Knoppix information to pop up in a browser when the disc is inserted into a running Windows system (if the system reads the CD properly and if autorun has not been turned off).



I would first figure out why two systems seem to be unable to read the CD properly from WIndows. If there is some issue with the CD then you might want to burn another copy with some software other than Alcohol (I don't know that Alcohol is an issue, I just have never used it and there is clearly some problem here). If the CD is fine but the CD readers are the source of the problem then again maybe another CD might help (try a CD-RW this time rather than a CD-R, it will make a big difference to the reader). Or you might decide to swap out the CD drive or just that it's not worth the effort to get them up to booting a CD.