hmmm...help, please?!?!

[frumunda]

alright, first off, i'm a relative newbie to the linux thing...i've tried linux several times but each has ended disasterously. knoppix seems to be my new buddy, since i've made it farther with it then any other distro (i can get it to run without crashing and so forth). any how, here's my problem: i can't get knoppix to boot into KDE easily. when i try to boot normal, i get some or a bunch of "cloop" errors, followed by some other stuff. it starts the hardware detection, then crashes out in the middle of it, then finishes the detection. then it procedes to boot kde, but it crashes on "system initialization" (i think that's what it's called, the little icon for it is the gears). it then pops up an error message and kicks me back out to the console. however...if i boot with "testcd" it goes through the cd checks, then hangs up...but, if i let the cdrom drive stop making noise, then push the eject button, it finishes the check and says the cd is ok. it may or may not have an error while detecting hardware, then goes on to load kde just fine. in fact, i even specified floppyconfig on this last boot with the cdtest and it loaded just fine, just how i set it up.
i'd like to install knoppix on my hd, to coexist with winderz, but i'd like to see if i can find the root of this problem first. any help would be greatly appreciated!

[eadz]

It sounds like it could be one of these problems :

the cd is faulty - you say you ran the cd test but it only worked if you ejected? try doing the cd test again, it should come out fine, without ejecting.
your cd may be a low quality burn - try a brand name CDR and burning at slow speed ( say 4x ).

It could be a faulty CDRom drive

If windows also crashes a lot, then it could be bad ram ( do a memtest - search for memtest86 ) or faulty hardware.