I have a very similar laptop to yours and I've never been able to solve the problem. I think 3.4 was the last version of Knoppix that worked correctly for me. I did determine that the "nofstab" cheat code allows me to boot the system, but that's because it doesn't access the hard drive in that case. I've tried every miserable cheat code and kernel parameter you can imagine: nodma, acpi=off, pci=biosirq - nothing works! It's hard drive access that causes the problem somehow. For example, boot into command line only mode, like this:

Code:
knoppix 2 nofstab
Now try, for example, to read the partition table on the hard drive with fdisk, but use strace to print out the system calls that fdisk is performing:

Code:
strace fdisk /dev/hda
You'll see that it dies when it attempts the read() system call to actually read the partition table from the disk. It calls read() and it never returns. This leads me to suspect the kernel rather than anything specific to Knoppix.

I had Mandrake 10.1 on that laptop, running Mandrake's 2.6.8 kernel, and it was fine. I recently wiped Mandrake and installed Ubuntu, which worked fine with their stock 2.6.10 kernel and a custom-compiled 2.6.12 kernel. So either it's something specific to 2.6.11 or it's something about the way the kernel has been compiled for Knoppix. At this point I've pretty much given up - I don't know what else I can try to help diagnose the problem. If you ever find a solution I'd love like hell to hear it. At least one other user on this forum has the exact same problem, too - it was he who originally clued me in to using strace to see exactly where fdisk was hanging.