Quote Originally Posted by Maud_Dib
I am just a newbee myself , but have you tried booting with the Zip drive disconnected ?

You may need to put HDD as Primary Master , CDROM as primary Slave , and plug the Zip into the secondary IDE Cable.
so you would have HDD = hda , CDROM = hdb , Zip = hdc/d
Hope this helps.
Good point. This should work to get the system to force it to boot from CD. But once it can boot from CD it will probably continue to experience the dropping to a very limited shell error. The link to the Using FAQ has a solution that should fix that problem.

In order to get a old system to boot, I have had to use the following cheat codes:
knoppix noscsi nosmp nousb nofirewire nopcmcia noagp nodma noapic acpi=off vga=normal