Thought I'd give Linux a try so after burning a Knoppix LiveCD, reboot the system, Knoppix starts to boot then disables the irq for my IDE controller and complains it can't find the CD drive... gee, ya think? This has happened with 3 different distro's. Any way around the disabling of irq's? Thanks in advance...

assuming you have checked the burn was correct with the md5sum then I suggest you look at these links and try in the following order these commands in the format

knoppix command

commands worth trying are
pci=biosirq
atapicd
nodma
noscsi

and for a full list of cheat codes try here http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Cheat_Codes

however there are some old bios that have trouble with emulations see here http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/knopp...cheatcodes.txt

if no luck pls report what type of hard drives you have on what controllers etc
what type of bios you have
what type of optical drive you have

I have assumed its on ide cable with one of your hard drives in my above answer

Thanks for the comeback Aus9... turns out after playing around in the bios, I switched my IDE config from Latency mode to Native mode, which moved my drive order around and freed up another irq. With this said, I popped the Knoppix CD back in the drive (after fishing it out of the trash) and it booted up perfectly! I must say I'm quite impressed with the KDE desktop. Now to locate some scripts I can add to the distro for a little more control over how it boots up. Anyway, thanks again for the tips (I'll hang on to them)... I'm gonna go play now...