Evening all, don't post often but here goes.

Due to the failure on the integrated CD drive on my laptop I have taken the budget option and now run an external IDE CD/RW via USB. This work fine if a little slow.

The problem I have is that when I attempt to start knoppix 2.8.1 from this drive all seems to go well, the initial splash screen appears and I have the option to pass commands onto the system at the bootprompt.

The system then starts to boot, detects usb/firewire devices then hangs when it can't find the knoppix filesystem having searched a number of options.

The error message is:

cant find knoppix filesystem
dropping you to a very limited shell

I think it is simply a case of passing the right commands to the system at the bootprompt. Have tried the most obvious suspects provided in the hints.txt on the cd, namely:

bootfrom=/dev/sda1
bootfrom=/dev/sda2

Running on a compaq presario 705EA with 256mb
usb cd drive is samsung combo drive in ide housing

Thanks all

the monkey