Thanks to the great guide by Krellan2 at http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bootable_USB_Key, I now have a 1Gig USB key booting Knoppix.

However, for several reasons, I need to be able to emulate Knoppix as well. Sometimes I may be at a computer that I am not permitted to reboot, and some need to remain in windows to perform normal tasks (i.e. computer at work). To this end, I am trying to get Qemu to run the bootable USB key.

This far, I have tried copying the qemu-0.8.1 directory from the DVD release to the USB device, and running the start.bat from that directory fails. Qemu loads, then fails immediately. It shows the POST screen, ata1 master: QEMU CD-Rom ATAPI-4etc etc, but then says CDROM boot failure code : 0004 \ Boot from CD-Rom failed \ FATAL: Could not read the boot disk.

Trying to create a custom batch file has yeilded better results, but still wont fully boot. It proceeds through the boot process until it tries to mount the root filesystem. Here is the batch file contents.
Code:
qemu-0.8.1\qemu.exe -L qemu-0.8.1 -no-kqemu -kernel linux -initrd minirt.gz -hda KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
The last lines fail with
Code:
RAMDISK: Couldn't find valid RAM disk image starting at 0.
No filesystem could mount root, tried: reiserfs ext3 ext2 msdos vfat iso9660 fuseblk
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,3)
Any help would be appreciated.