First: all the below was performed on a Dell R610 server. twin Zeons, 48GIG of ram. twin 500GIG drives.

Knoppix 8.2 - transferred the ISO file to DVD. Booted and Ran fine, except it incorrectly identified the Matrox vid card. Simple fix, changed the resolution. Worked like a champ. Moved DVD to a 32GIG Sandisk USB - note size here of the USB as it changes later. Hid it under the hood of the R610, told boot manager to do a normal boot after configuring the R610 to boot off the USB. Came up like a champ. Viola. Nice software.

Went to 8.6, same hardware as above. Same procedures as above. CORRECTLY ID'd the Matrox vid card this time and set the resolution correctly. No keyboard and the mouse pointer is missing on the monitor. The mouse is there as I clicked it and could see where it was on the screen sort of, but no pointer. Moved 8.6 DVD to a second 32GIG Sandisk USB. Booted fine, but same issues woth keyboard and mouse.

Next, Downloaded 9.1... Same hardware as above. Booted fine from DVD. ID'd correctly the Matrox vid card. Had mouse and keyboard this time. Outstanding. Used Knoppix's move from DVD to USB. Dies at bootup, however, note here, this time I decided to send the software to a 512GIG USB.

Is there a Knoppix limit on the size and rev (2.0 vs 3.0) USB????

I will duplicate everything previously completed using a 3rd 32GIG Sandisk USB tomorrow....

few things to consider.

1. How did you "move from DVD to USB" you should just use a proper tool to build a bootable LiveUSB
2. As old as that hardware is, it may not like installing from USB, not sure on this, but with the age it could be an issue.
3. If it installs from DVD, install from DVD and deal with hardware issues. Do keep in mind this Dell server will run RHEL and forks, and should also run SUSE and Ubuntu, and their forks.

First: Thank you for the response.

Next, if you will kindly re-read my initial message, I stated that the 8.2 rev worked flawlessly, so in my statement I failed to include the word, 'correctly' moved the software from DVD to USB, using the built in Knoppix tool. Forgive my error please.

Once again, I stated that the 8.2 ran fine from a live DVD AND USB.....
Since all 3 Knoppix variations (8.2/8.6/9.1) Ran from a live DVD, hardware becomes a non-issue, for me anyway. Am I wrong in this assumption?

The R610 has 4 external USB ports. It also has 2 ports under the cover for the very thing I am attempting to do and that is Getting away from a hard drive installed system. In the BIOS, it has multiple boot options, USB, LAN initiated, Hard drives, PXE, etc. It may not be new. However, twin 64bit ZEON, 4 core processors running at 2.93GHZ is no slouch, in my humble opinion. EOL support was 4 years back...

For your perusal......
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Feature PowerEdge R610 Technical Specification
Form Factor 1U rack
Processors Quad-core or six-core Intel® Xeon® processors 5500 and 5600 series
Processor Sockets 2
Front Side Bus or
HyperTransport Intel QuickPath Interconnect (QPI)
Cache 4MB and 8MB
Chipset Intel 5520
Memory1 Up to 192GB (12 DIMM slots): 1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB/16GB DDR3 up to 1333MT/s
I/O Slots 2 PCIe 2.0 slots + 1 storage slot: two x8 slots, one storage x4 slot
RAID Controller
Internal:
PERC H200 (6Gb/s)
PERC H700 (6Gb/s) with 512MB battery-backed cache;
512MB, 1GB Non-Volatile battery-backed cache
SAS 6/iR
PERC 6/i with 256MB battery-backed cache
External:
PERC H800 (6Gb/s) with 512MB of battery-backed cache;
512MB, 1GB Non-Volatile battery-backed cache
PERC 6/E with 256MB or 512MB of battery-backed cache
External HBAs (non-RAID):
6Gbps SAS HBA
SAS 5/E HBA
LSI2032 PCIe SCSI HBA
Drive Bays Internal hard drive bay and hot-plug backplane
Up to six 2.5” SAS or SSDs
Maximum Internal Storage1 Up to 12TB
Hard Drives
Hot-plug hard drive options:
2.5” SAS SSD, SATA SSD, SAS (10K, 15K), nearline SAS (7.2K), SATA (7.2K)
Solid state storage cards:
Fusion-io® 160GB ioDrive PCIe solid state storage card
Fusion-io 640GB ioDrive Duo PCIe solid state storage card
Fusion-io 320GB ioDrive Mono PCIe solid state storage card
Fusion-io 640GB ioDrive Mono PCIe solid state storage card
Fusion-io 1.28TB ioDrive Mono PCIe solid state storage card
Communications
Two dual port embedded Broadcom® NetXtreme® II 5709c
Gigabit Ethernet NIC with failover and load balancing.
Optional 1GBe and 10GBe add-in NICs
Broadcom NetXtreme II 57711 Dual Port Direct Attach 10Gb
Ethernet PCI-Express Network Interface Card with TOE and
iSCSI Offload
Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Server Adapter and Intel Gigabit
ET Quad Port Server Adapter
Dual Port 10GB Enhanced Intel Ethernet Server Adapter
X520-DA2 (FCoE Ready for Future Enablement)
Brocade® CNA Dual-port adapter
Emulex® CNA iSCSI HBA stand up adapter OCE10102-IX-D
Emulex CNA iSCSI HBA stand up adapter OCE10102-FX-D
Emulex OCE10102-IX-DCNA iSCSI HBA stand-up adapter
Optional add-in HBAs:
Brocade 8GB HBAs
Power Supply
Two hot-plug high-efficient 502W Energy Smart PSU or two hot-plug 717W High Output PSUs
Uninterruptible Power Supplies:
1000W-5600W
2700W-5600W High Efficiency Online
Extended Battery Module (EBM)
Network Management Card
Availability
DDR3 memory; ECC; hot-plug hard drives; optional hot-plug redundant power supplies; dual embedded NICs with
failover and load balancing support; optional PERC6/i integrated daughter card controller with battery-backed cache;
hot-plug redundant cooling; tool-less chassis; fibre and SAS cluster support; validated for Dell/EMC SAN
Video Integrated Matrox® G200, 8MB shared video memory. (not a gamer card for sure. I don't do games!!!)

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In Summation: My reasoning for all of this is that If I am hacked and my system goes down, I can remove the Knoppix USB drive, install my duplicate and have my Amateur Radio BBS/file server/print server back on line in a couple of minutes.

I see you have CentOS experience. My SME 10 Server software is CentOS based! The R610 runs Ubuntu 20.04 just fine....

Again, your response was appreciated. And I trust I have answered your questions???

KC4TEQ

Since this is an old Dell, I would do a check for bulging or leaking capacitors on the board. Dell has a habit of getting cheap capacitors that start to bulge and leak over the years causing odd issues depending were on the board they are and the amount of current they are mismanaging.

Once you are sure they are in working order, then it would look more like a software issue for your problems.

Probably, I would also investigate the market prices of newer hardware.

Thoughts. Knoppix is usually awesome.

USB drives have an issue with linux once in a while.
I'd start with usb2 since once in a while usb 3 on older stuff has issue.
Some distro's need a boot option that may help usb.
Might not have usb support for boot in Knoppix.
Might be that you are trying to boot to usb and you should be trying to boot to a hard drive order.

Thanks to each one of you for replying and your comments. And I had never heard of the Dell mother boards with cap issues, but have seen faulty caps tho. Something to watch for..... Vielen Dank!

And now to the actual problem. A nearly dead/dieing 2023 keep BIOS memory alive batt-tree!!!
So it was hardware, so of, after all. I would set BIOS to boot from the USB, Restart/reboot or Power down and it would forget!

I now have Knoppix 9.1 on a 512G thumb 3.0 stick, that is blistering fast at boot up. Also have twin hard drives in a RAID configuration for nothing but data. So I R Fat, dumb(er for not replacing that battery earlier) and very happy. Will see if I can lock down that thumb drive from being written to.

Once again, many thanks for your support!