Quote Originally Posted by mpn
I might try the smart boot manager. Does that run off a floppy, and if it does is it safe to use (i.e. does it do anything to the HD)?
SBM can be "instaled" to either a floppy or a hard disk. As long as you have a floppy I would certaily start with that, so that you can get a feel for the program and see how well it works for you.

If you like it you can install it to the hard disk. It will replace the MBR in the first sector of the disk. It is easy enough to make a backup of this sector in Knoppix with the dd command if you want to try SBM on the hard disk and then replace the old MBR if it is not to your liking.

Another boot managet is XOSL. I like XOSL a lot more than SBM, and it used SBM code to still allow booting of optical discs on systems that don't fully support it. It also provides a much nicer GUI than SBM, and has a number of start-up features that make it much cleaner. The downside is that while SBM can be install to the MBR without affecting any of the rest of the disk, XOSL is larger and does require some other disk space, I suggest giving it a partition of it's own of a few meg in size. But start with SBM on a floppy to see if it solves your boot issues.