Quote Originally Posted by simusid
...I have tried various IDE and SATA drives, 2 vid cards (pci) and different sticks of RAM. I have tried every default/failsafe/simple BIOS setting and as far as I can tell, pretty much every knoppix boot option. ....
I don't know what your problem is, or what you have on those hard disks, but since Knoppix doesn't need a hard disk at all I would suggest unplugging all of the hard drives from the motherboard and try booting again. You certainly shouldn't get a "VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)" error that way, and it's not unlikely that it might boot completely, allowing you to rule out the video cards, RAM, mb and anything else you might have changed. Then you can focus on why the strange file system message is coming up. Alternately, if the system still fails to boot it will likely give a different error and you'll be able to rule out the ext2 file system.