I attempted to load Knoppix from CD onto my XP system (AMD Athlon 64 ) and everthing seemed fine, but no desktop loaded- only black screen.
I them re-ran setup using FAILSAFE boot and was able to boot to desktop, however my mouse did not work.Keyboard worked fine. However this did not detect all my hardware.
I have 2 mice installed. One is optical scroll mouse in PS/2 port - the other is wireless mouse (USB)
I did try to boot with USB mouse unplugged, hoping that other mouse would work but nothing. Could it be because it is optical mouse?

Took the CD to work and was able to install fine on both my Pentium XP network workstation and an also older Windows 98 PentiumII machine.

Any suggestions on where I begin as far as my booting problems on my home machine? Why would the system hang at black screen when trying to do normal boot during hardware detection.
Many thanks