I am confused as to why this happening. I have booted knoppix with all good results from other computers, for some reason mine (which is much higher end than the others i booted it from) will not work properly.
I insert the disk, press enter to boot, it does its thing where it recognizes my hardware, "audit", etc.

Then one of two things happen
one- the screen just goes black, there is activity in the CDROM though.
Two - there is a band of 'static' in the middle of the screen. My monitor is 17", I would say the band is about 3.5" wide horizontal in the screen. It looks like the KDE blue on the edges, and the "LINUX IN USE" background black in the middle. I am not sure why there is a graphical problem. Any ideas?
I am running...

480W power supply
MSI Neo motherboad
400mhz 512MD DDR RAm
Maxtor 40GB hard drive.
ATI radeon 9200SE

I have had Fedora run on this system no problem.