Quote Originally Posted by bilzer
On installed knoppix 3.1
System froze (keyboard, mouse) - I turned off machine.
Turned back on. System came up without kde. I logged in. Could not start kde. Tried to logoff.
Found shutdown command but couldnt get it to work. Turned off machine. Now when starting again (from recovery floppy or from harddrive) machine hangs on adding swap (which has been there all along).
What should I have done when the system froze?
I certainly can't say I've never had a system freeze but more often than not Linux will recover- just give it a moment. Realize that what usually crashes is X and not Linux.

How do I start kde if the system comes up without it?
startx

Boot the Knoppix disc->
knoppix 2
root
<pwd>
mount /dev/hda? /mnt/hda?
mcedit /mnt/hda?/var/log/syslog

You could also just chroot over to /mnt/hda? if you want to.

Have a look- take your time- see what there is to see. Forget all you ever learned about logs and messages from wimpdoze and look at what Linux will tell you. The answers are very often times there to be found. Always enter errors into google.com/linux - there are hundreds (thousands?) of mailing lists that get searched as well.

A quick something to try would be to reformat the swap file.
When an OS (yes any OS) is interrupted during a write operation (and that's of course what a swap file does) it can leave all sorts of weird things dropped in various places on the disk in a drunken gi fashion (my apologies to the drunks who are not gi's). Since it hangs on the swap file it wouldn't hurt to eliminate that as a possibility right?

How have you formatted your hdd(s)? What filesystems that is.

edit
Forgot to tell you to mount the hard drive! Of course you can always boot completely into KDE and do it from there much more comfortably I suppose. I prefer the CLI as it is much faster.