By "tried formatting..." I meant I tried the installation after formatting it (without error messages) as ext3, then again as reiserfs.

What do you mean, create a filesystem? Is this a manual step that you have to do outside of the Knoppix installation procedure? Nothing during installation prompted me to make a filesystem, and there was no such option underQTparted.

mkfs.ext3
mkfs.reiserfs
Where and when do I do this? Remember, it doesn't boot, so I can't do it from within. Do I boot from CD and do it from root? If so, how do I let it know that I want to do it to the harddrive, and not to the ramdisk?

'same result': mount: fs type devfs not supported by kernal ?
Yes

What do you mean with 'is named' - the name you pick manually for your partition?
No, the name that I see when I type 'fdisk -l', as follows:

  • Disk /dev/hda: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3648 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
    /dev/hda1 * 1 2934 23567323+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
    /dev/hda3 2999 3648 5221125 83 Linux
    /dev/hda4 2935 2998 514080 82 Linux swap

    Partition table entries are not in disk order


Perhaps related, I've tried mounting my WInXP drive from Knoppix (booted from CD), and I get an 'fs' error, as follows:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,
or too many mounted file systems
(could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)
I will try mkfs, but as I said, i'm not sure where I do this from (I'll try root console and look for proper syntax). Thanks so much for your help; I'll post my results.