how do I test laptop internal hard drive from Knoppix DVD?

[Alan Cox]

> the progressive bar at the bottom of the screen starts out blue ending
> with Fedora 13. When it reaches Fedora 13 it turns white and thats it
> - nothing happens after that.

Does it just go white or does it fade to white. A white screen sounds
like the X server/graphics being the problem, so the '3' failure case is
odd.

> When I edit the boot prompt editing the kernel line - I add a space
> and 3, it still does not boot, I get the text that I have not seen
> before and it halts, I think that last thing displayed is "killed"

The content of the text is somewhat important if you want anyone to be
able to debug it.

> I'm thinking I'm having a problem with the internal hard drive. It
> shutdown last night and the problem started when I tried to boot this
> morning.

Boot with "init=/bin/sh"

Then at the # prompt

fsck -a /
fsck -a /boot
sync
sync
reboot

This will bring up just the kernel itself and a shell (no init, no
services), and you can then force a check of the file systems. If there
is anything inconsistent on the Linux side that should show it up and
probably fix it.