I assume when it said could not find knoppix file, it would drop you to the very limited ASH.

the only thing you can try is to try mounting youself to see if the kernel (and/or the loaded scsi driver) can see your CD-ROM at all through :

mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd? /cdrom -o ro

replace the '?' with 1-8.

If all failed, I am afraid you are out of luck, either the wrong scsi driver is loaded or the driver on the boot disk cannot support your scsi host adaptor at all.

It should not have anything with the boot loader as the boot loader only get you to the kernel and the initrd which is loaded successfully.