Well, you are supposed to just hit enter at boot. . . theres nothing wrong with that and that caused nothing wierd. . .

However, earlier I recomended that you type 'expert' instead of hitting enter, but thats ok. . .

but i am suspicious the the boot image on 'd' perhaps it downloaded wrong, maybe nreo though you were trying to burn the image straight to the 'd' drive . . . or perhaps the image itself is in a state that is preventing windows from recognizing 'd' and all you have to do is delete it. . perhaps you instead booted form the image on 'd' instead of the cd rom.

I can't see your computer, so I can't be sure on any of this. A lot of it is really reaching, but it makes no less sense than knoppix repartitioning your hd.

One of those was that a partition was successful.

Opened it again. Slow. Got to a GUI desktop this time.

Opened it a third time, and got to the Knoppix logo which fills the screen, couldn't get out of that into the desktop.

Linux has a lot of messages that sound scary, a common one if 'pipe broken' but its really not meant to be taken like that. . . I suspect it could have been taling about virtual partition, or ramdrive partition. . .

How long did you wait for the GUI desktop to load? Sometimes its taken a long time, but after that, it was really quick. And knoppix has run really quickly on computers far slower than yours. . . . some something definitly was not right. . .

I'll think about it some more. . .