I had a similar problem with a VIA chipset, but the "knoppix nodma" worked for me.

Quote Originally Posted by preater
Hello.

First post!

I'm having problems booting from my Knoppix 3.1 CD - it always hangs during boot, specifically, at this point:

And we see nothing more. I'm using a board based on VIA 694X. Yes, I know my board is cheap, old and slow (UDMA66, really!).

Which is right at the beginning of the messages shown! I do have the Knoppix "cheatcodes" and have tried disabling hardware autodetection for everything I can, i.e. noapm noapic noagp nodma noscsi nousb, but it's made no difference at all. No damage is caused by this hang, and I can restart and boot using LILO without any problems. But I want my Knoppix!

I'd appreciate any advice about how I might go about fixing or just bypassing this problem.