Unable to boot Knoppix 3.3-2004-02-09 or 3.3-2003-09-17
I have a friend with a three year old desktop system from Dell. She can't get the boot order in the setup to change the order things boot in, so she's been using a boot floppy. About two week ago, the 2003-09-17 version froze completely, and then wouldn't boot, so she tried the 2004-02-09 version and got the same error after loading minroot.gz:

crc error<6>Freeing initrd memory: 478k freed
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 01:01

Please note that it doesn't seem to be a problem with the .iso; I'm using a CD burned from the same download right now, and both her CDs have the same problem.

Basically, no matter what we tried, the system always stalls right after the penguin appears in the booting part- not the boot options screen. It doesn't seem to ever touch the CD drive.
We've tried changing the boot order, booting with and without the floppy, switching which CD drive the disc is in, and using a different boot floppy, all with the same result.

The system has two FAT32 hard drives, a CDRW and a CD ROM, and has been apparently experiencing screen problems (turning completely blue for a split second) recently when running Windows XP, not that I think that's related.

Any thoughts?