I have a travelmate 3000 series laptop. I have tried to use a variety of live cd's to boot it but all fail. The issue I think is related to the external firewire drive. It seems to be unable to find the drive after boot. I have tried to run knoppix with the failsafe option and it ends with "can't find knoppix filesystem". The display is a little unique in that it is optimized for 1280x800 but I doubt that is the issue. It can boot other wise I would not get the knoppix boot screen however it can not go any further or not much further. I tried running in "expert" mode but the screen goes blank soon after the intial kernel attempts to load just like when I try to use the failsafe option.

any ideas?