writing to new hard drive

hellohello,
knoppix is currently saving my arse from a windows induced data hostage situation... now i am trying to convert this un-cooprative windows box to debian... windows 2000, currently accessable through knopix 4, on its way to debian sarge... but first i want to get some data to a safe place.

under knoppix i installed a big ol' 160G Western Digital HD (IDE) as a slave to the existing 80G maxtor... i want to copy the old data to the new drive and then set up debian on the old drive.
(also on the machine is a SATA Maxtor HD... NTFS so i'll just leave it out of this)

i've created and formatted three partitions on the new HD using fdisk and mkfs: hdb1 (ext2), hdb2 (ext3), and hdb3 (also ext3)
here's the problem: i mount the new partitions and try to set the permissions to write (tried the Actions->change read/write mode as well as chmod)

>chmod 777 /mnt/hdb1
chmod: changing permissions of `/mnt/hdb1': Read-only file system

it won't let me write to the new disk... can't copy files to it... tried to save straight from vi... no luck.

it lets me chmod & write to the master drive... but not this new one.

maybe missed a step in the partitioning or formatting?
i am new to knoppix so appologies if this is a silly question... but i don't know where to go from here,
any help would be much appreciated.
thanks,
nathan epp.

It is not a permission thing, it's that Knoppix mounts the drives ar read only by default. See answer 6.

Also, while you certainly can save the files to an ext3 partition, have you given any thought on how you are going to get them back to a Windows system? Depending on what you are going to do I might have made them FAT partitions, which both Knoppix and windows can read, rather than ext3.

thanks much for the quick response,

mounting -rw from the command line allowed vi to write.
but the kde still couldn't save.

not just an answer 6 issue... maybe 6.1 : )
ownership... the new drive was owned by root... while the old drives belong to 'knoppix'

chown -R knoppix /mnt/hdb1

did the trick.

thanks for the help.
nathan.


p.s. thanks for the ext3 caution... but windows had its chance... never again will it preside over a computer of mine.