It's look like general problem for Knoppix-3-3. I also have close problems:

Peanut-9.5, Fedora, and Knoppix-3.2 have no such problems, but Knoppix-3.3 refuses to recognize HD during booting, and next, mount, remount, fdisk, cfdisk do not see HD either.

Only in Knoppix-3.3 /proc/kmsg :

<4>hda: host protected area => 1
<3>hda: drive not ready for command
<6>VFS: can’t find ext2 filesystem on dev ide0(3,1,2,3)

As only Knoppix-3.3 has this problem, its looks like that vmlinuz-2.4.22-xfs causes it. I never set any passwords or any in this PC.
What is a problem? How to overwrite it?? My be somebody has answer, anf if i'll in find I'' post it here.
Best, Alex