mrmr96,

I hope I can help you out on this one...

When running from the Knoppix CD, as a boot, you really don't have any options on removing the CD while you are booted. The "Operating System", any one that can run off of a CD that is, locks the CD tray, so that the system always has access to its files.

With that said, here are some options:

(1) - Install Knoppix on your hard drive as a "full-fledged" operating system, thus freeing up the CD-ROM drive...
(2) - If you have, I think the best guess is, at least 1 meg of RAM, you can run Knoppix into memory and run/boot it from RAM, thus freeing up the CD-ROM drive...
(3) - If you have enough free space on your hard drive, approximately 700 meg - the size of the CD, you can transfer the contents of the Knoppix CD to that hard drive, and boot from CD residing on your hard drive, thus freeing up the CD-ROM drive...
(4) - If you have a PCMCIA card slot on your laptop, you can buy a second CD-ROM drive to run off the PCMCIA slot, and still use the CD-ROM drive you are using as the Knoppix CD boot device, and use the "other" CD-ROM drive for your software requirements...

I think thats about it. I am sure others may have hit this same stumble you are, and others may have more options, but, I think this is about it. Not many options, but then again, when you consider Microsoft has a good monopoly going here, if you have a program that "only runs in Windows XXX", and you only have Windows AAA, you pretty much have to gut your system to run that program. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, not a fair comparason, but then again, it makes it Linux 2 and Microsoft 0 -

Hope this helps a little,
Cuddles