Knoppix is not entirely reliable in detecting hard drives on bootup. I have on MSI K7t266pro2 motherboard that wont work on any linux distro except for SUSE9.1 for some strange reason. It would be nice if someone could improve knoppix, make it even smarter, and make it try a few different things in case the standard drive detection doesnt work... i still havent resolved my issue.
It turns out that it was my error . I had my ATA drives connected to the ATA channel using a standard IDE cable... i guess it works in windows but not in Linux . LOL