That finally did the trick. None of the other attempts were completely successful, apparently because not enough of the system initialization had occurred (linuxrc, knoppix.sh, rc.local. isolinux.cfg). I was surprised because rc.local didn't work, but adding a link rc2.d and rc3.d to a script in init.d worked just fine. I can mount a partition and reconfigure the nic as needed. Thanks for the help! Rich