I downloaded Knoppix 3.9 a few days ago and liked what I saw. So I decided to do a HDD install. There were a few input/output errors in the terminal while knoppix-installer was running, but the installation completed and I rebooted. The system hangs with

VFS: not syncing Kernel panic unable to mount root file system on block....

etc etc. I got the same error back when I tried to compile the kernel on my old Debian system and screwed something up. I don't know why this would happen after a fresh install though. Any ideas?