I'm trying to boot KNOPPIX from the CD on an old Dell laptop that has Windows 98 installed.

I set the CD as the first boot device, and it is successfully reading the CD and starts to boot KNOPPIX.

This is how far it gets:

Welcome to the KNOPPIX live Linux-on-CD!
Scanning for USB/Firewire devices... Done.
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hda [FUJITSU MHK2060AT]
Enabling DMA acceleration for: hdc [SAMSUNG CD-ROM SN-124]
Looking for CDROM in: /dev/scd0

And this is where it hangs up. I have a blinking cursor that takes input from the keyboard, but is otherwise unresponsive.

Addiitional information that may or may not be relevent, the battery for this laptop is dead, but the computer seems fine on AC.

I'm new to Linux.

Thanks for any help!!

Try some of the cheat codes such as "knoppix noapic noapm" etc. to skip hardware detection.

Thanks for the tip on the cheat codes!

For anyone following in my footsteps:

I wasn't able to successfully boot with the cheat codes I tried (I didn't try them all), but I was able to boot up using failsafe, which I learned about when I pressed F2 at the boot prompt (silly me overlooked that).

I think next step for me is to figure out which cheat code would work. Failsafe boots with hardly any hardware check, and may be overkill.

I find it interesting that the computer is able to read the cdrom (it's booting from it) but hangs up when finding the cdrom.

Try knoppix nodma at the boot prompt. The newer Knoppix versions have this for current boxes.