Knoppix hangs on boot with failed HD in the system

[chosun]

I am trying to pull the data off of a failed hard drive, and knoppix hangs during boot. I've tried booting with the "knoppix noudev nodma" command, and it gets a little further, but hangs when it tries to scan the partitions. I've also tried connecting the drive after knoppix is done booting (it's a SATA drive), and it starts to try to configure, but then hangs. Any help would be much appreciated.

[hal8000]

You need to post some details about your system, motherboard, chipset, sata controller if known.

The hard drive isnt causing the hang, knoppix will boot with no hard drive whatsoever. Heres a list
of boot parameters, more commonly known as cheat codes:

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

You dont state if any boot messages are being displayed, or the last message displayed on screen.
You may be unlucky and knoppix may not recognise the hard drive controller.

Be aware that knoppix 5.1.1 uses kernel 2.4.19 and knppix 5.3.1 DVD uses a more recent 2.6.24 kernel.
Which version of knoppix are you using?

[OErjan]

try

knoppix nodma noudev nofstab nomount noswap

[chosun]

Sorry, the holidays had me a bit busy...

My motherboard is an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe, and I'm using the on-board SATA controller. If I unplug only the failed drive, it boots without issue, which leads me to believe that the issue doesn't involve the SATA controller (there is another SATA drive in the system). When I just run "knoppix 2", the system hangs at "Starting udev hot-plug hardware detection..." Also, I am using Knoppix version 2.6.24.4.

When I ran "knoppix nodma noudev nofstab nomount noswap", I was able to finally boot...thanks! Now I just need to figure out if I can figure out how to run dd_rhelp on the failed drive. Any help would be much appreciated!

I apologize for the basic questions, but I've very new to Linux and don't really know my way around very well.