Thanks for the quick reply!

Unfortunately, I don't have access to Workstation or any other products (I don't think you can create VMs in Player...?), but I suspect that this is less of a VMware issue than it is a KNOPPIX issue since persistence just isn't working at all. I don't feel a need to do a real HDD install since that's pretty much Debian but not, but does anyone have any information on loading knoppix-data.img from IDE/SCSI hard drives instead of USB devices?