Ok - so I'm trying to get Knoppix to boot and play nice so I can chroot into another partially installed *nix system to finish that install - I don't need perfect hardware support, just ethernet and a responsive system..

Sadly, an instance of modprobe is sucking up 99.9% CPU regardless of what boot flags I give, and I can't kill -9 it either. It appears to be udev's fault..

Teach me for trying to install on esoteric hardware (Arima W830-DA laptop, otherwise known as an Alienware m9700).

So far I've tried booting with:
knoppix
knoppix nodhcp acpi=off noapic pci=bios
knoppix vga=0 acpi=off pnpbios=off noapic noapm nodhcp
knoppix nodhcp apci=off noapic pci=bios nohwsetup
knoppix failsafe nodhcp

nodhcp is needed because dhcp hangs trying to get an ethernet address for some reason, so that'll be the next challenge if I can fix udev.

There's no difference with any option at all - it always runs the spinny-bar hardware detection, and always starts udev.

Anyway, the modprobe that spins is:

Code:
root      1486     1 98 23:01 ?        00:12:28 /sbin/modprobe pci:v00001814d00000201sv00001462sd00006833bc02sc80i00
Pretty sure it's normally spawned by udev, though this time it appears to be spawned by init - I think it's probable that udev itself exited and orphaned the process, however.

lspci:
Code:
0000:00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3)
0000:00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev a3)
0000:00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)
0000:00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)
0000:00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3)
0000:00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
0000:00:04.1 Modem: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Modem (rev a2)
0000:00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2)
0000:00:07.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
0000:00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
0000:00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev a2)
0000:00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
0000:00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
0000:00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
0000:00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
0000:00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
0000:00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
0000:00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
0000:00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
0000:01:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd: Unknown device 0832
0000:01:06.1 0805: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter (rev 19)
0000:01:06.2 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd: Unknown device 0843 (rev 01)
0000:01:06.3 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter (rev 0a)
0000:01:0a.0 Network controller: RaLink Ralink RT2500 802.11 Cardbus Reference Card (rev 01)
0000:05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd.: Unknown device 4363 (rev 12)
0000:06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0298 (rev a1)
0000:07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 0298 (rev a1)
dmesg implies that it's doing everything the full boot would do - maybe I'm not doing the 'failsafe' properly? Weird..
dmesg is available here: http://dev.mind-design.co.uk/dmesg.txt


Help, please :-/ this is driving me nuts now, it's like a challenge

Any advise gratefully received - I may not be new to Linux (been going since Slackware in '97), but I've lapsed a bit recently and udev is a whole new ballgame to me, let alone knoppix