That's what I was afraid of... I thought it looked an awful lot like the voodoo magic that comes with an HDD install. I'm surprised though: I thought simply loading the kernel would do the same thing as "knoppix" at the isolinux prompt. If I'm mistaken, that explains a lot. I'll take a closer look at this ".cfg" of which you speak. Thanks!

As for learning, the booting process is mostly what I'm interested in learning about. I know my way around Ubuntu and GRUB, but not Knoppix, and I've never really taken an in-depth look at the boot process (loading modules, mounting filesystems, etc) for any distro. No time like the present!