Hello, there! As my post count implies, I am a n00b to these forums. I have checked the Knoppix burning and usage FAQs before posting, but was unable to find an answer to my problem. Thus, here I come.

At first, I downloaded the Knoppix CD-ROM from an “official” download site – not a non-endorsed third party. I proceeded to burn the ISO to a 700MB CD-R, and then tried to boot with it. Unfortunately – and this was my mistake – I did not ensure that the CD-R was burned as bootable, and so it wasn’t. At that point, I burned a new, bootable Knoppix CD in nero burning ROM. The size of my bootable Knoppix CD-ROM’s data is approximately 696MB, specifically 729,833,472 bytes.

Just to experiment, I set my BIOS to boot from the floppy and then the CD-ROM, and tried it with the first, non-bootable CD. (I was not sure whether it was bootable at the time.) Of course, that didn’t work, so I downloaded and installed Smart Boot Manager on a floppy to see if I could get it to boot with that. I received a “Failed Disk” error.

Next, I popped in the certainly bootable CD, and restarted the computer. This time, the computer attempted to boot from the CD... and led me to a black screen, with a blinking cursor. I left the computer unattended for a good ten minutes, but when I returned, nothing had happened. I attempted rebooting several times, and it was no different. Then, I attempted booting from the Smart floppy and the CD-ROM in turn; this yielded the same result.

To make sure it wasn’t an isolated incident, I tried both CDs by the same means on three different machines. The first one ordinarily runs WinME/WinXP in a dual-boot configuration, and it is a 1GHz with 512MB of RAM. The other two are identical to one another; they normally boot into Win2000 Server, and are 700MHz rigs with 128MB of RAM each.

Am I inexplicably sh*t outta luck , or did I have two bad Knoppix burns? Or is it something else I am not even thinking about?