For some odd reason no distro seems to work on my dell. I was thinking it was my hdd but it i tried knoppix since it runs on the CD. I got to the main knoppix screen, not the desktop then it bring me to this black screen where the _ keeps flashing. I waited then my screen went black and stayed like this for a long long time. I just turned if off. I let it go for like 30 min.

Some distros refuse to work on my PC, though it's not a dell. For example, rebooting after Slackware 8.1 and 9 installs something with the motherboard's signal from video is screwed up because during POST there's no display whatsoever, so I'm left with a blank screen . Only way to get a display was to discharge CMOS, and if I tried booting into either version, after selecting the kernel to boot, there was no video display . SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, Windows 2k, and WinXP work fine.

I have a couple of questions for you.

Is your Dell a laptop or desktop? and What version of Knoppix are you using.

If you have a Dell laptop I have seen Knoppix stop while loading because of the PCMCIA and I had to disable it at the knoppix boot prompt. But, this could have been fixed. Depending on what version of Knoppix you are using.

The latest version has resolved alot of bugs I had with my Dell Desktop here at work. I had to manually configure the sound and NIC card before, but not now. The latest version ROCKS!!! So, if you don't have the latest version 3.2 you should consider giving it a shot.

Dave

did you try one of the boot options like the one
for vesa video display?

I run Knoppix at work on a Dell Optiplex GX240 without any problems, everything is detected on boot. So no problems here