I downloaded knoppix last week and it ran beautifully off the CD (well, technically, it ran off the /knoppix folder on a Windows data partition, since my laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM drive). Sound, APM & PCMCIA installed without any problems.

However, when I attempted to install it onto a regular linx root partition on the hard drive it I had problems. Although it installed a working Debian, KDE, etc., it lost the static network connection (which had worked fine "off the CD") and the desktop lost all kinds of things, from the wallpaper to the X tools for network configuration. In fact, the whole Knoppix folder is gone from the X menu, along with OpenOffice and a lot of the nice touches present in the CD set up. I did the MD5 check on the ISO, although I suppose my CD burner might have hiccupped.

1) Is this normal for a hard drive install or some glitch?

2) Since I can still boot into "off the CD" mode, is there a way to globally copy the working CD file structure on top of the hard drive file system? I know there's a ramdisk involved, but I'm not sure how to copy the correctly configured "installed CD" configuration.

Any help would be apreciated. Actually, my ultimate objective is to get a reasonably modern Debian into my non CD-ROM laptop. Knoppix looks like it would work great, if I could get the "CD" version onto the hard drive (it has an external floppy, so I really need to get it booting off of the hard drive). Thanks.