Well turns out that my .iso image of knoppix was bad. I was using an incomplete bittorrent file that was the proper length but was corrupt since the torrent hadn't completed.


I booted with

"knoppix bootfrom=/dev/sda1/knoppix51.iso" and it worked beautifully on my desktop, switching to the flash drive after booting with the cd.

Then I tried it on this laptop with a wonky cd drive that doesn't like cd-rs very well and it worked, but oddly it was still accessing the cd as well as the flash drive.