David,

Just found out about Knoppix yesterday (6/12/03) and had the same problem trying to get Knoppix to boot on my HP pavilion ze5170 notebook. Initially, I thought it was the CD, but the CD worked fine on other computers I tested. Also, the CD boots up fine in a VMware session on the same computer.

Later on in my Knoppix exploration, I was able to successfully boot into commandline mode on the ze5170. The next thing I plan to try is to modify the MBR using Findpart to show only one partition. Right now I have 9 partitions for testing purposes.