I borrowed a Knoppix 5.1.1 DVD from a friend and tried to boot with it. I have failed repeatedly. This is what happens.

I get the screen which says "Please hit ENTER to start Linux from DVD". Upon hitting ENTER, I get the screen with the penguin at the top-left corner and the following text:

Welcome to the KNOPPIX live GNU/Linux on DVD!
Running Linux kernel 2.6.19.
Total memory available: 514168kB, Memory free: 505364kB.
Scanning for USB/Firewire devices... Done.
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda [Maxtor 6Y080L0]
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdc [Samsung CDRW/DVD SM-352B]
Looking for DVD in: /dev/hdc

...nothing happens after that. The LED on my CDRW/DVD combo drive blinks twice and then stays off. The HDD led on my CPU stays on forever. The cursor blinks for quite some time (it accepts keyboard input) and then even that freezes.

Details of my system:
Intel Pentium 4 2.26 GHz
512 MB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
ASUS P4B533-X Motherboard

I read some of the other posts in the forum about problems with NVIDIA graphics cards. I tried "knoppix xmodule=vesa" but even that did not work.

Here is a complete list of all the commands I tried at the boot prompt (none of which, of course, worked)

knoppix xmodule=vesa
knoppix xserver=XFree86
knoppix xserver=XF86_SVGA
knoppix xmodule=nv
knoppix screen=1024x768
knoppix fb1024x768
fb1024x768
knoppix desktop=gnome
knoppix xvrefresh=60
knoppix xmodule=svga
knoppix 2
knoppix home=scan
knoppix noapic noagp noapm noaudio noddc nodhcp nofstab nofirewire nopcmcia noscsi noswap noudev nousb nousb2 noideraid pnpbios=off acpi=off
knoppix vga=normal
knoppix toram
knoppix testcd
knoppix mem=512M
knoppix mem=128M
knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1
(after copying the KNOPPIX directory from the DVD to hard drive. Freezes after showing "Starting udev hot-plug hardware detection".)
knoppix ide2=0x180 nopcmcia

All that was an immense test of patience (waiting till the system hangs completely everytime), but still I got no result. The only thing that worked was "failsafe". It started Knoppix but did not detect my PS/2 mouse so I couldn't do anything.


What am I doing wrong? Is there any way out for me? I'll gladly provide any other necessary information.

Imtiaz Ahsan
Dhaka, Bangladesh