Knoppix looks for IDE and SCSI CD-Rom drives. I don't think it has support for the proprietary Sony, Mitsumi, Panasonic and Teac pre-ide models.
I am trying to boot knoppix on an old 486 with a sony cdu33a cdrom that runs off a sound card. Machine can't boot from cdrom. Have made boot disk using mkfloppy from the knoppix cd. When I boot knoppix from floppy, says searching for cdrom, can't find cdrom, then drops to limited filesystem. (I entered cheat codes for text mode, mem, screen, etc. I know cd is good, runs knoppix on another machine.) Is there a command I can pass to knoppix at boot to tell how to find the cdrom?
Knoppix looks for IDE and SCSI CD-Rom drives. I don't think it has support for the proprietary Sony, Mitsumi, Panasonic and Teac pre-ide models.
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I am trying to boot knoppix on an old 486 with a sony cdu33a cdrom that runs off a sound card.
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As stonent says, Knoppix can't find the CD-ROM because it's hanging off the sound card. You can buy an IDE (ATA) CD-ROM for about $20-40 these days that will be faster and more compatible -- they are relatively easy to install.
When you DO get it running, you may find that something like IceWM will run more smoothly than the default KDE window manager.

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