Quote Originally Posted by bender
but I just need the startdisc/bootdisc ...
(because I have a floppy)
Smart Boot Manager IS a boot disk of sorts. It will allow you to select the boot device and will work in most cases. It will work with almost ANY boot device that your system might recognize. It has worked quite well for me in the past. It does NOT modify your hard drive or system if you install it to a floppy. It allows you to select the boot device, whether it is the optical drive, floppy, or hard drive. It is very simple to use and set up. It will allow you to boot other types of disks from your optical drive and is not limited to Knoppix as the knoppix boot disk might be. It is a very good alternative, since I don't really know of an easy way to produce a Knoppix boot disk without the bat file to do so. It appears that the boot disk option is not available in the newest version of Knoppix. Smart Boot Manager is a very good tool and I keep a couple of disks around and use it quite regularly for systems with issues such as yours. I would highly recommend that you try it, since it appears that the option you are looking/hoping for is not available in Version 5.0.1.

As I mentioned before, it could possibly be a bios issue and you might be successful looking for a bios update from Dell. It may make the Bootdisk unecessary.

Other than that, I don't know what to tell you. A viable solution has been recommended and it appears that you don't wish to try it. I would also like to buy gasoline for under $1 US, but that is not possible here anymore either, so I have to deal with what is available.