Own 2 computers, can only boot from 1

[sandgroper]

I own two computers; a pent 200 mmx with 64 meg of ram, and a pent 2 with 320meg of ram. Both have cd rom drives. With the lack of sufficient ram to properly boot Knoppix on the 200 mmx I did a swapfile to dos, in which I was able to run Knoppix 4 and to check it out. It is a bit slow, however, I can navigate through most of the apps without falling to sleep!

With the pent 2, its a different situation. Everytime I tried to boot up from the cd, everything goes fine until I receive this line... network device eth0 detected, DHCP broadcasting for IP. and it just hangs there, and hangs there. No matter what key strokes I use, the cd will not eject, and in every case I had to restart the computer. I suspect a hardware confliction, though I do not know where the confliction it or how to rectify it. At the same time, the cd should be loading up onto the system's memory, so is it the ram that's the problem?

As a newie who is activiely engaging in migrating to Linux, trying out the live distro cds, to me, is the way to go, without spending hundreds of dollars in trying out an os. I would appreciate any ideas and suggestions in resolving this.
Thanks

Sandgroper

[Harry Kuhman]

It is very unlikely your RAM, if you want further confirmation it is not and you are running a recent version of Knoppix (not that old copy from the book), type memtest at the boot prompt.

You can try booting and typing knoppix nodhcp at the prompt. You will not get an automatic network connection this way, but it will determine if that's the source of your problem and get you started. If that works see answer #3.