I have no cdrom. This is what I've done so far:
Installed debian on box, just enough to get to shell.
Fdisk'd an 800MB partition (/dev/hda1, DOS), the rest of the disk is ext3 (/dev/hda2) and swap (/dev/hda5).
Used wget to grab KnoppMythR5A9.iso, expanded it to the DOS partition.
So now I have /dos/boot/isolinux/... and /dos/knoppix/.... on /dev/hda1.
Everything is there and md5sums are good.
I copied loadlin to /dos/boot/isolinux and booted from a Win98 floppy, since I couldn't figure out how to make grub happy.
From DOS:
c:\BOOT\ISOLINUX\> loadlin.exe vmlinuz ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=miniroot.gz nomce nodma quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

I've tried it with/without nodma, same for the BOOT_IMAGE parameter. I tried adding expert. I tried adding fromhd=/dev/hda1 and also tried /dev/hda2, since at one point I decided to copy the KNOPPIX directory into / on my ext3 partition.

I tried adding bootfrom=/dev/hda2/km/KnoppMythR5A9.iso

No matter what I do, it boots to the point where it looks for the knoppix file (I guess) -- it scans through /dev/ and then says it Can't find knoppix filesystem, and I get a "limited" shell. Worthless is more like it.

This works:
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda2 /mnt
and I can verify that the drive is mounted correctly and things are where they should be -- of course, I don't have "ls" so I have to use "cd" and "pwd" trickery like this: cd; cd /mnt/km/; cd K* (at which point it tells me it can't cd to KnoppMythR5A9.iso -- of course not, it's not a directory -- which establishes that it can see the file).

This doesn't work:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt
says:
FAT: codepage cp437 not found

I've tried re-fdisk'ing /dev/hda1 as FAT32 (was originally FAT16), mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda1, no help.

But so what if /dev/hda1 is "broken" in KnoppMyth's eyes? It still scans to /dev/hda2 and finds nothing :(

I'll keep trying but would love some suggestions!

There are no provisions for installing w/o a CD-ROM. Sorry, you're on your own. You may find some additional details on knoppix.net.

Good luck,

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Not sure what I was doing wrong before, but I figured out how to get grub to work.

The vmlinuz kernel on the KnoppMyth ISO doesn't like DOS filesystems (who does??). So I changed /dev/hda1 to be ext2.

Basically this is what it took:

I had a base debian system installed... barely. I never got through the full install, just enough to get to a command prompt. Probably didn't need to go that far even.

use fdisk to change hda1 to partition type 0x83 (Linux)
mke2fs /dev/hda1
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/kmcd
download ~/KnoppMyth.iso
mount -o loop ~/KnoppMyth.iso ~/km
cp -a ~/km/* /mnt/kmcd
cat >> /boot/grub/menu.lst
title KnoppMyth
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/isolinux/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1
initrd /boot/isolinux/miniroot.gz
boot
^D

I think that was it... reboot and choose KnoppMyth from the grub menu.

Now all I have to do is get a tuner card, bigger hard drive, etc :)