Quote Originally Posted by kittybriton
The thing that's worrying me is that I get the same error message / result on both the machines I have tried so far.

Does "Kernel panic: VFS: unable to mount root fs on 01:03" mean that it is unable to mount one of the drives?
if so, how do identify which drive? and how do I remedy the problem?
I don't think so - but I'm no expert on this. Because Knoppix is set up to run with exclusively read-only media, any intrinsic mounting by the kernel must be on virtual structures, like RAM-disks. Physical writable media is not mounted at boot time. This panic might mean (among other things) memory read/write errors, but as you get the same on two different machines, I suspect, as Oerjan also indicates, that it is your booting disk, CD/DVD media errors, or bad image to burn. Did you check the md5sum of the image, and if that is correct and booting still fails, could you try other burners? The ISO image of the CD is easily transferred on a 1GB pendrive.