I've been battling with Knoppix-installer_0.3-14 that has got me tearing out my hair (what there is of it).

It's an older laptop. I've 80MB memory (the max it will hold). The HDD is empty and partitioned. cfdisk reports hda1 - bootable - Primary Linux - 3503.97MB, and hda5 - Logical Linux - swap - 822.53MB. Yes its a small HDD. When I did the partitioning cfdisk was unable to reread the data and requred a reboot. That confirmed the partioning I had set. Doing ls for /mnt/hda1 showed that there were no files present.

A reboot, (Knoppix 2) showed that knoppix (3.4) correctly identified all the hardware.

The computer is not connected to the web, so I downloaded the knx-installer_0.3-14.tar.gz to another computer (Windows) and copied the file to a floppy. Then by emulating the script from the web, I copied the tarball from the floppy to the computer running live Knoppix. I then successfully unpacked and ran the script.

The first stages of installation ran well, I answered the "who am I" questions and provided desired passwords. Then immediately after the summary page when I pressed "Y" I got an error message from mkfs. "Error: Formatting of failed. Some messages from mkfs.ext3: Usage of mkfs.ext3 [..." etc.

Another clue.

If I choose "Partition Harddrive" from the installation menu it attempts to load cfdisk but cfdisk gives the message "Partion Disk. - Opened disk read-only - you have no permission to write." Curiously cfdisk when opened from the command line gives no such message - thats how I partioned the drive in the first place.

Therefore, I think that somehow, my HDD is (or has become) a read only drive - at least as far as linux is concerned. Windows appears to be able to write to it with no trouble.

So. How do I make the HDD writable to linux? I've tried Google searching this one, but have had no success.

Any help you can provide will be appreciated.