I am trying to boot into knoppix (5.1) on a machine that I suspect has a bad HD.
When I boot the knoppix disk, it hangs at "looking for cd in /dev/hda"

I can take the Knoppix CD to another machine and the disk boots just fine.
So no problem with the disk
I have tried some of the cheat codes for booting:

knoppix noapic
knoppix boot=/dev/hdd
knoppix boot=/dev/hdb

None of which seem to work.
Can anyone suggest something that might get me past this point ?

Thanks

ETA: "Knoppix nodma" cheat code does not work either

Try deselecting the harddrive in the bios and removing the IDE cable. Then we can tell if it something wrong with that disk or if it is related to your IDE channel or something like that.
Post your current disk configuration if you could.

I took the Hard drive out of the machine and slaved it to another machine and it seems to be ok.
I think the Knoppix issue is that the 5.1 version of knoppix is compressed and needs a HD to decompress.

Thanks for the reponse

Exactly which version of knoppix are you using?

What you just said does not fit my understanding and experience with knoppix.

I'm using knoppix 5.1.1 DVD-2007-01-04-EN

I'm pretty sure that behaves just like the CD version of 5.1.1 (but has more optional packages installed).

It does NOT need to decompress to HD. It runs just fine for me on systems with no HD and on systems where it doesn't understand the raid HD.

From what you said so far, your problem sounds like an IDE cable problem, or maybe incorrect settings in whatever IDE configuration your BIOS supports, or maybe the IDE port is just broken on that motherboard.