I have been at this for a while. What I want to do is to be able to use ntldr to boot into an hd poorman's install of Knoppix. It seems doable and I would like to understand what is going on - i.e. why it doesn't work!

Here is what I did. I booted KNOPPIX from the CD and used mkfloppy.bat to create a bootable floppy.

Then I logged off, booted in Win2K, made an 8 GB fat32 partition, made a KNOPPIX directory there, copied to this directory in this order: vmlinuz, miniboot.gz, and KNOPPIX image. (Got these ideas from previous contributions to this forum.)

Then I popped in the floppy, configured bios to use the floppy drive as the first boot device, and allowed the system to boot. It came up using the HD "install". I then used the following command to copy the first 512 bytes of the fat32 partition as follows:
dd if=/dev/hdb3 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin

I then logged out, rebooted in Win2K, copied the linux.bin file to my C drive, edited the boot.ini file to add the following line:
c:\linux.bin="KNOPPIX"

Then I restarted, and when given the choice, selected the KNOPPIX boot option. The moment of truth had arrived and sadly, all I had for my effort was a flashing cursor in a gray screen.

A quick peek at the linux.bin file just to see if there was anything to be learned showed that the last lines said:

NTLDR is missing˙
Disk error˙
Press any key to restart

What I thought would happen is that the NTLDR would use the linux.bin to find the vmlinuz file in the fat32 partition and that booting would proceed from there.

I realize that others have tried this and not succeeded. If it cannot work, at least I would like to understand why. Any answers from the wise ones in this forum will be most appreciated.

Eventually, I plan to really install Knoppix. I am just taking my time, and trying to learn along the way.

Thanks.