Bloat has grown the kernel too large to fit on a floppy. Most people who can not set their BIOS to boot from CD are using a program like SBM or XOSL to boot the CD. What is this hardware problem that you speak of? If we know what the problem is we may be able to tell you how to work around it.

The problem is that somehow my CD drive messes up disks that are meant to boot the system; it did it with two legal disks burnt with XP Pro and now it did it again with two disks I burnt with Knoppix. I have set the BIOS to boot from CD first.

As the system boots, it reads the CD first, the blank screen shows a hyphen blinking a few times, and then it bypasses it to boot Windows XP. An IT professional had told me he thought it was a hardware problem. In case it was a software problem, I tried uninstalling the driver for the CD drive and then reinstalling it, to no avail.

So as I brainstorm about how to solve this problem (other than having the CD driver replaced), I wanted to boot Knoppix from a floppy disk. I read that there is a file you can put on a floppy that will direct the system to the Knoppix CD. While it may not work, it's worth giving it a shot.

Any ideas and/or suggestions are welcome.

____________________________________
Gabriele Giommarini

Can't be a driver problem, the OS (and thus the drivers) are not loaded at that point in the boot process. Only software it could be is the BIOS. Sure sounds like a strange problem. The CD otherwise works fine?


That sounds like SBM, I gave you the link above.

I have not checked either of the two Knoppix CDs I tried to use on a different computer, but I did try to run two Windows XP Pro installation CDs on another computer after two failed attempts at running them on my computer, and they had been turned into coasters. Again, the installation CDs for Windows XP were perfectly legal (the license holder had burned them for me as part of their license agreement).

I'll try the Smart Boot Manager to boot Knoppix. I appreciate your help.

I guess that there could be a problem where a CD drive destroys writeable media if it somehow writes when it should read. Never heard of a real case of it though. You seem to have done some of the steps that would prove that something is happening to CD with your above tests, but hardly enough. I would burn CD's on a different system (or get some burnt CDs) and see if I could read them on the "different computer" above, then and only then try them in the suspect computer. Then, if the suspect computer fails, see if they can still be read in the "different computer" or if they are now bad. And if bad a tool like ISOBUSTER might give you some insight on what is now wrong with the CD. Of course, I would look at the CD closely to be sure it wasn't becoming extremely scratched, but I would expect you have already done that.

There is also a chance that you are writing the CD too fast; I always recommend 4x or as slow as the drive will go (a few new drives seem to burn no slower than 8x). Higher burn speeds do cause problems. See http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17788
and
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=78925#78925
for examples, search the forums for the words burn and speed for many more. And, of course, try SBM. You might not even need it once you resolve the other issues, but it will not hurn and will avoid any BIOS CD boot problems.

Thanks for the pointers. This information may help me solve this problem.

Although I have not done some of the test myself, an IT person did some for me. The college where I teach is licensed to issue Windows XP Pro CDs to its faculty members. That's how I upgraded my Windows XP Home to Pro (at that point, my computer read boot CDs). But when SP2 messed up my ports, I decided to reinstall Windows XP Pro+SP2 (new disk) from scratch. It was at that point that the boot problem started.

I took my laptop to my office and an IT technician tested the CDs ruined by my computer on my office computer (to which I do not have administrative access). The disks were in fact coasters. He then burned a third XP Pro CD and tested it in one of his computers, which proved the CD worked. I have not iserted that CD in my computer just in case, and I am not sure at what speed he burns CDs.

Now, he claims the third XP Pro CD he burned worked fine, and I took his claims in good faith (but with a pinch of skepticism, I must admit).
So in a way the boot CDs that don't run in my computer run well on a different computer, but I don't have first-hand experience of that.

I do not understand what the CD drive does to a CD that has been written on and closed. In theory, a closed CD is no longer R but only ROM. If I can't solve this problem, I'll have to take my computer to a service center, but that'll be the last resort.

As it is, I'm looking forward to running Linux, and the chance to run it from a CD sounds fantastic. I'm going to try the boot floppy-to-CD route first. Since I still have the Knoppix files I downloaded, I can burn as many CDs as I need till I get this to run.

Thanks for your help.

I have recently purchased a new computer & have a copy of Freeduc 1.5 burn't to a re-writeable disc, It seems to boot fine on my other computers but when I select to boot from my disc drive the screen goes blank & about a minute later it proceeds to load Windows XP. my disc drives are ASUS DVD-E616P3H & a LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1633S are these drive known for problems when booting Freeduc?

Can anyone help me?

So you never see the Knoppix boot splash screen, correct? If that's the case, I'd suspect that the CD-ROM can't read the CD properly. Try burning a new copy at a slower speed.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

I am having a similar problem hopefully my information can help lead to a conclusion
I also realize this is an older post but I could not find any other post with a solution or similar problem
I have tried multiple computers and burning at an extremely slow speed. I have also done the knoppix testcd and everything is ok on that. When I tried useing smb I got the message smbk bad! I get the same blinking Hyphen or Underscore and it then skips to boot up windows xp. Some other background if it helps is that I CAN boot the install/recovery console for Windows XP but I never see the Boot screen for knoppix on this one computer. Just before I had a registry/SP2 problem I installed Quake III on the Windows HD disk with no problems.
Thanks in advance

I'm as Clueless as a baby in a topless bar!