Quote Originally Posted by dfield58
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?
Perfectly normal

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.
I have Knoppix 3.2 installed as my primary OS. It is a beautiful thing. You can recreate your own desktop icons, you can do a netcardconfig to get your network back up. The 'X' tools you refer to as being on the desktop are nothing more than links to the actual programs. Open Office is in the Kmenu.

As always post back with any more questions.