Honestly I have yet to hear of anyone getting Knoppix to boot from a pcmcia drive. I realize that you cannot install Linux to your work machine but if you can spare a meager 700M or so partition you could boot the compressed image from hdd as though it were booting from cd. You don't actually install anything but rather copy a 700M file to a fat32 partition. The instructions are here if you'd like to try it.