just tried it myself....

What I had was the 1 HD with 2 partitions 1 for swap and 1 for the OS. THere was currently NO OS installed

First time I ran the knoppix installer I got a siilar error... I was missing something that was preventing knoppix installer from working. I then ran it again with the following options

IGNORE_CHECK=1 sudo knoppix_installer

so far so good. Installer started and its happily formatting my partition as reiserfs. THis was farther thatn I got the first time.