Hi! I have KNOPPIX_V6.0.1CD-2009-02-08-EN. On VMWare 6.0.4 the boot hangs at the beginning (black screen with penguin in the upper left corner, but no text). In 'failsafe' mode, however, it boots. So I decided to see /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg .

One by one I removed from the 'failsafe' entry those kernel arguments which are not in the 'knoppix' entry:
Code:
vga=normal atapicd nosound noapic nolapic noacpi pnpbios=off acpi=off nofstab noscsi nodma noapm nousb nopcmcia nofirewire noagp nomce nonetwork nodhcp xmodule=vesa
And it still boots. Then I added missing arguments from the 'knoppix' to the 'failsafe' entry:
Code:
apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt.gz nomce quiet loglevel=0 nolapic_timer
"nolapic_timer" was the last and with it 'failsafe' finally refused to boot. Then I removed "nolapic_timer" from 'knoppix' entry and now knoppix boots on VMWare.

I don't know what apic timer and kernel timer are; they say that 'nolapic_timer' can cause the PC to consume less electricity. I think, in case of VMWare it's not so important.