I was under the impression that Knoppix would run on any system with no HD. Would someone please shed some light on how to run Knoppix on my recently acquired laptop? It is an old system:

433MHZ
24XCDROM
96MB RAM

My problem is that the CDROM begins to boot up but then dies down. It does this everytime I attempt to load and then (the system BIOS) asks me to insert a system diskette. Can some guru please help me out? Do I need a Linux boot diskette?

CAL

knoppix _is_ a bootable disk. something else is wrong, though i cant be sure what it is.

May I ask if your computer can successfully boot to any other CD?

The reason i ask is that i had a similar situation. My Pentium III laptop has 128MB RAM and runs at 400MHz. When my hard drive crashed, I was forced to run off of custom Win98 boot CD's and Lindows Live CD. I got tired of it stalling and grinding during startup, so I pulled out the defective hard disk and then it would not boot any CD at all!

After many days of tinkering, i found that i had to pull out my (swap-able) CD-ROM drive and move a little switch to change it from CABLE SELECT, or SLAVE, to MASTER instead. Now i run Games-Knoppix on my little laptop without a hard disk drive.

About 1 out of 10 boots, it will hang. I don't know why; maybe i have defective memory, or it could be that i used the cheapest CD i could find. Now that i'm used to Knoppix, i'm willing to record it to a good quality CD!

-John

Try to boot knoppix v3.3. You don't have enough ram to boot the newer versions properly. If you make a 3.3 cd, you shouldn't have any issues. Knoppix-std will also boot with less than 128mb of ram.../peter