I figured it out last night. Apparently, my Knoppix CD is bad. Even though the hd install went perfectly, I had lots of files in /sbin that were empty (0 bytes). Included in these files was 'getty' and 'shutdown'. So, that explains the errors I was getting.

After discovering this, I booted with the CD using 'knoppix testcd' and it failed when checking the knoppix image. So, I booted up with a 7/26/03 CD, mounted my hd install (hdd2) and copied all of the files from the /sbin directory to /mnt/hdd2/sbin where the existing /mnt/hdd2/sbin files had 0 bytes size.

This seems to have worked fine. No more "respawing too fast" errors, and the machine shuts down properly when you select 'shutdown' or 'shutdown and restart'.

I'm planning to burn a fresh Knoppix 3.3 CD today.

Thanks,

BamaRob