Even though it boots on other systems there is a small chance that the combination of the CD and the drive don't work together, particularly if the CD was burnt at high speed. But it's more likely that you need one or more cheat codes at boot time. See the cheat codes section of the wiki and, better yet, the cheat codes document that came with your BitTorrent download, but some codes to try are knoppix nodma and knoppix noscsi acpi=off .