After a couple of false starts (e.g., incorrectly copying the .ISO file to the CD-R disk rather than writing it as an .ISO), I managed to burn a good copy of Knoppix 3.2 (downloaded 5/11/2003 from a German mirror). I burned it at 4x and the 486 SCSI CD-ROM can read it when booted in Win95B or OS/2. Yaaaa!

The boot floppy (made with "rawrite2 -f boot.img -d A" from Win2k (note that "boot-en.img" doesn't exist on this CD though it did on my copy of K 3.1)) works fine - I get the splash screen and the "boot:" prompt.

But, when vmlinuz.... trundles for a while, it dies and I get "Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue" no matter what options I specify at the "boot:" prompt when I try to boot the 486 from the boot floppy and the CD. :-(

I've tried:

failsafe
knoppix 2
expert
knoppix noapic noagp noapm noaudio noddc nofirewire nopcmcia lang=us
expert noapic noagp noapm noaudio noddc nofirewire nopcmcia lang=us

I always get the same error, "Boot failed: ..." I've never seen the CD-ROM light come on while it's trying to boot.

The 486 has no "boot from CD" option in the BIOS, so I've got to use the boot floppy.

How do I specify that it has the VLB UltraStor controller? Do I have to tell it that the graphics card is VLB as well? How do I find out why the bootup is failing? What's the format of a "knoppix.sh" file? What should go there? Any other things I should (a nearly complete newbie) should know to get this beastie running under Knoppix?

If it matters, the graphics card is a Diamond Stealth Pro VLB card (S3 -86C928) with 1 MB of video RAM.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Scott.