My Knoppix fails to boot in a very frustrating way:

1. disc in CD drive, turn on PC
2. screen says Knoppix 3.6 04-8-16
3. new screen,
penguin in upper-left corner,
then a screen or so of boot messages,
4. then a flash then Black Screen.............
5. Now here is the odd part: when I press the power button to turn the PC back OFF, I see a Knoppix screen for a half-second before the power goes down - whassup with that???

I was given a bare-bones PC without a hard drive, so I got a new Hitachi drive and have been trying to any kind of Linux to run ever since.

I think my fatal mistake was to format the drive as FAT using the Hitachi disc, so Linux has trouble writing to it. I had a copy of SUSE Linux that failed, so my buddy suggesting booting from Knoppix to get going, but that hasn't worked for me either as described above.

I tried expert mode, but I don't know what 'expert' things to try. Any suggestions?

thanks for any help