Tinker
You are a genius, it works perfectly! I had a feeling there was a way to do it in Linux without having to use LILO. After all this must be what initrd/ramdisk essentially does to use the file system on the CD? LILO is a great boot manager, but in this case I simply did NOT want a hard disk based boot manager. I learned something new today, and am glad that with Linux I am not a sandboxed and patronized lemming end user that some large OS companies would like us to be
Thanks for all your help--your constructive and detailed advice is greatly appreciated!
Lynn

knoppix single (at boot prompt)
sudo su
mkdir /mnt/new_root
mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/new_root
mkdir /mnt/new_root/mnt/old_root
cd /mnt/new_root
pivot_root . /mnt/new_root/mnt/old_root
mount /proc /proc -t proc
init 5