First time using Knoppix ...

[Nightshade7676]

First time using Knoppix and I have a few questions.. The main site says, you can run Knoppix right from CD without installing... So that means my Win-XP partion that is already installed should be fine then, right?

I just don't want it to mess up what I already have setup. I have already read the faq , and just want to hear from some people who have been there and done that.

Any first time user help would be great :)

[budhy]

Don't worry, no risk at all!

[Nightshade7676]

many thankz for the reply :) once its done downloading, I will give it a go! ;)

[aay]

Yep you'll have no problem. I have just one piece of advice. Once you boot up knoppix you will see certain links on the KDE desktop. These are mount points for your hard drives/partitions. For example your will probably see one link that says "hda1" This will be your windows drive. You can click on it an look at all of your windows files. Here's where the advice comes in. If your drive is formated with NTFS then you will be able to read the drive/partition fine. However please do not try writing (saving) to that partition. NTFS read support is fine in Linux, but write support isn't fully there yet. This probably won't be an issue, because Klaus Knopper wisely decided that the desktop links would be set to mount in read only mode. You have to go out of your way to change that. I'm just mentioning this in the off chance that you did do this. This is the only way that I can think of that Knoppix might do something unexpected to you Windows drive. But don't worry. Unless you try to write to an NTFS partition you will be fine.

P.S. Though write support isn't fully there you can safely resize your partition using QTParted. This will come in handy if you like Knoppix and decide to make room for it on your hard drive and install it.