Quote Originally Posted by KneeLess
Sorry, I thought it was evident that I have Intel AC '97 On board sound.

I apologize.
When you said there was no option to disable sound in the BIOS I assumed there was no on board sound there is usually an option in the BIOS to disable the sound in mine it is in the Intergrated Pheriphials so no apology is necessary. Getting back to the topic at hand have you confirmed that the card is recognized on boot by Knoppix, once booted use dmesg | grep AC97 this will show you all lines with AC97 in them from the boot messages. Also with my onboard sound (VIA VT82C686 AC97) I don't need alsa when I boot the CD and HD install it will work fine without it you may want to try without the alsa cheat code. Another thing you could check is lcpci -v and see if there are any IRQ conflicts with any other devices.