I have recently acquired KnoppixV3.3-2003-11-19.EN and burned
to a CD. I tried to use its default boot on a dual boot system with
Win98 and Slackware 9.0 aboard. It would not boot into KDE but
I could use the console mode (Knoppix 2).

I wanted to use it to access and correct problems with ReiserFS
which was preventing me from booting into Linux although I could
still boot into Win98 with LILO.

It turns out that the harddisk has probably developed some bad
blocks which ReiserFS cannot handle. This is apparently causing the
boot problem as well as the inability to mount my Linux partition
within Knoppix.

Is it likely that this situation is preventing the KDE interface from
starting properly?

I have followed the procedure Ctrl-Alt-F1 to see if I can see what
the exact cause of the hang is but the only thing that appears on
the console is:

X11 Starting....

Note: The system boots properly into KDE on another dual boot machine
with a properly functioning Reiser filesystem.