Quote Originally Posted by wordpaw
Hi, I'm trying out Knoppix for the first time. I downloaded Knoppix V 5.1, and used Nero to burn it to CD. I verified the md5 check sum (it's accurate). Computer is an HP Pavilion laptop - not sure if this would make any difference.

.... and I burned at second-lowest speed on Nero. If anyone could give me any advice, I would be grateful.
It's helpful to know the Computer model, but Pavilion is a generic term that HP has used for many desktop and notebooks, so it would be more useful to give us more details on the compute. Model number at least, but to save someone trying to help you from looking the model up, I would suggest also giving some specs.

I'm not sure what second lowest speed means, Nero will vary greatly depending on Nero version and hardware in question, I've seen the lowest speed offered for CD burning range form 1x to 10x on different systems. My advice is to aim for 4x or as low as you can go if forced to go above 4x. Still, I doubt if the burning speed is your problem.

You might find, depending on your hardware, that you need one or more "cheat codes" to get you past problems with hardware detection. Some common cheat codes that may help in your case are noacpi, noscsi or DMA=off. You would use these at the boot prompt as in: "knoppix noaspi anscsi DMA=off" (omit the quotes). You might also want to see if the failsafe cheat gets you running. Failsafe bypasses a lot of hardware detection, so you will not want to normally run this way, but if failsafe gets Knoppix running than it's pretty certain that the disc is good and that you can get Knoppix to boot once you find the right cheat codes. The expert cheat code will walk you through the boot process. This can be handy to find just where hardware detection is going bad. Make notes about how you answer the questions if you try expert, and if you get a hang change your last answer. Follow the documentation link near the top of this page and see the cheat codes section of the wiki for more details.

Good luck.