Hi, I downloaded KnoppMyth R5E50 and checked the MD5 key, everything was fine. When I try and boot I get the message:

"Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limted) shell.
Press reset button to quit."

Can anyone help?

Affected machine setup:
Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2
AMD Athlon3000XP+
1GB DDR400 RAM
ATI Radeon 9500
200GB Seagate ATA133
LiteOn DVDRW+/-
Avermedia analogue capture card (will upgrade to Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T-500 if I get mythtv to work)

Most likley a bad/incompatible burn or your CD is in a funny location on the IDE chain. Check your BIOS and make sure that the hard disk shows up as the primary master and that there is only one CD/DVD drive which shows up as the secondary master. This is the most vanilla and reliable configuration.

You may also want to check the jumpering (MA/SL/CS) and cables (are you using a CS cable? is the drive on the right connector?) on the drives.

The HD is alone on the primary cable and is set to master. The CD/DVD drive was alone on the secondary cable and set to slave. I have now set it to master with the jumpers, but no difference.

If I try "knoppmyth testcd" to verify the burn, it does the same thing, so I can't even test if it was a bad burn. I burned at a slow speed though (as always), and haven't had a burn failure for a long time, but I will try burning a new disk with a different make of CD, this time with "verify written data" ticked just to make sure.

Ok, I have re-downloaded and re-burned R5E50 on a different make of CD, and it worked! I wouldn't have expected that, but thanks for the suggestion.

Anyway, now it is refusing to format the drive because it says I don't have permission. The drive is partitioned with WinXP on one, OPENSuSE 10.2 on another, a new EXT3 partition for Knoppmyth and 150GB left over for media. Could this be the reason?

I have spent quite a while installing and configuring SuSE10.2 and I'd rather not have to re-install it all over again if Knoppmyth fails to perform.

Is there any way to force Knoppmyth not to format the drive before installation? It is preformatted using SuSE so there's no reason it should have to be re-formatted at all.

I have tried typing "expert" at the boot prompt but it seems to make no difference to the installation menu.

Are you sure that you actually selected something to format? Generally when people report this they're failing to hit the space bar to put a check mark in front of the drive to be formatted... Searching here for the exact text of the error message with the "search for all terms" raidio button on should find more info.

Hi,

We really could use a short cut to this one as it is typically, jumper on drive not set proper, cable not on the proper connector, wrong port on mother board, sata enabled to boot first and the general "let me set up the hardware first" step that may get over looked.

Give it a real good once over, and besure to check tjc's tips and tricks on Xsecrets wiki
Mie

Well now I feel very daft. Although, at least if it's common then I'm not the first to have made the daft mistake.

So it installed OK this time, but despite choosing the MBR for the boot loader, there was no mention of it at bootup, it was GRUB just like SuSE put in, with no additional choices. So I tried installing again, this time installing bootloader to /root, but same difference. I then used an old boot disk to fdisk the MBR, installed once more with boot loader going onto MBR this time, and now I get "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER".

It appears that KnoppMyth isn't installing a bootloader of any kind. Should I do it manually? If so, how?

EDIT: I used the partition editor to set the partition as bootable and tried again - no joy. I wiped the drive and performed an auto-install and now it's booting. The only problem now is my monitor sucks, and as soon as X starts my screen switches off. I will plug it into my main comp's monitor later and see what I can see.

Ok, so I have plugged my KnoppMyth box into another monitor, but I can't seem to find a way to change the default screen resolution.

If I plan to take my KnoppMythBox downstairs and plug it into my TV, how do I change the resolution? I have looked through the wiki and the FAQs and can't find a straight answer.

Also, I have been using a Belkin USB WiFi card which I installed in SuSE with NdisWrapper. Is there any way of repeating that installation in KnoppMyth? It would be nice to have a command to actually see a desktop GUI in KnoppMyth to perform certain tasks.