In Knoppix 7.0.5, I like reiserfs, but I'm not keen on grub

[Capricorny]

I think everything that the kernel handles is handled out of the box in recent minirt.gz's. So any problem running from a standard file system type doesn't originate there. Problems with media are IMHO more likely to originate in media/filesystem complications, of which there may be any number.

General problem with grub2: I haven't tried the last releases of grub2, but one major weakness when I tried, was the necessity to run updates from within an installation. That defeats the whole premise of a unified bootloader. With legacy grub, I just mount the booting partition, add a new subdirectory under /boot with the necessary kernel images etc, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to add the new boot options. Very clean and simple. And the booting partition is never mounted during ordinary use.

title Knoppix 7.0.5 64 bits   sda1 cloop
      kernel (hd0,5)/boot/knx705/linux64 fromhd=/dev/sda1 knoppix_dir=KNOPPIX705 nosound keyboard=no ramdisk_size=100000 lang=no apm=power-off initrd=minirt_sq_1.gz nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 tz=localtime
      initrd (hd0,5)/boot/knx705/minirt.gz

For example, I just added a KNOPPIX705 subdirectory on a NTFS partition (alongside an earlier KNOPPIX directory containing Knoppix 7.0.3), copied KNOPPIX from a 7.0.5 stick in there, copied the files in /boot/syslinux to a new subdirectory /boot/knx705, and referred to that. I think the problems with legacy grub mostly arise with mappings of system (system.map etc). My impression is that legacy grub tends to believe stubbornly that it resides on the main harddisk.

For such reasons, grub4dos has been suggested as the best alternative, but I haven't tried it so far.

The simplest way to use Linux file systems on sticks etc is probably to set up a smaller FAT32 partition with syslinux, and have the KNOPPIX directory on a Linux partition, using the fromhd cheat code in necessary.