Hi folks

My buddy was very impressed 'tother day when I re-enlivened his dead Windows XP box using Knoppix 3.3

It appears something on his system has gone wonky, the system won't boot from anything resembling a hard disk on either IDE 1 or 2.

It'll boot ok from floppy & CD.

Once you're in, you can see everything on the hard disks, in Knoppix, just fine.

I currently have his main NTFS HDD on IDE1 as master, and a blank, dos-formatted small HDD on IDE1 as slave. CD is on IDE2.

NOW, although I can see hda1 and hdb1 plain as day in konqueror, plus any files that reside on them, what I can't do is copy anything across from hda1 to hdb1. The issue seems to be one of permissions, although when I look at 'properties', the 3x3 grid of permissions is already showing 9 x's

I'm wondering if I need to change to root (su passwd or similar?) then change read/write permissions for user knoppix$ (now knoppix#)?

So that I can get all his classwork off of hda1 and stick it on hdb1 for 'safe keeping', before we do the computer maintenance equivalent of taking a pickaxe to the bizarrely-acting motherboard / bios?

What is my best bet for allowing hdb1 to be written to within knoppix.

Thanks for any help.