Ok, I cleaned up the cheatcodes and copied the knoppix/knoppix folder to the hard drive hda3. It looks like it does a scan over and over like this:
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda3
until it stops with: 'could not mount disk to /mnt-system. Starting debugging mode...'

I am confused between the fromhd= and bootfrom= cheatcodes. Do I need them? I feel that I am close to getting it to boot, but need some clues.