Quote Originally Posted by Massimo
Problem solved.

I was booting knoppix with the pendrive inserted. Otherwise, when inserting the pendrive after knoppix boot, all problems go away.

That demonstrates I'm definitely a neewbe.


Massimo Corinaldesi
That's odd. Booting with the pendrive installed is the only way I ever do it - in fact, I typically save my Knoppix configuration to a thumbdrive instead of the HD, and I wouldn't be able to do this if I couldn't boot with it inserted. I always assumed that for a live CD boot (or poor man's or Knoppix-style hdinstall) with autodetection (IOW, not a hd install), Knoppix wouldn't recognize anything that didn't go through the autodetection process. So, no, that's not a newbie mistake to boot with a pendrive installed - that's entirely legit.

I recently bought a USB thumbdrive that I had problems with in Knoppix - couldn't make it writable. But after I reinstalled the FAT32 filesystem to it in a root terminal, all problems went away, and it behaved like any other thumbdrive. Could be that you might want to try that, because Knoppix should be able to autodetect it. The only other thing I could think of to explain the difference was that this particular thumbdrive, unlike my others, was USB2.0 rated, which should be fully compatible even if the system and/or OS aren't USB2.0. Anyway, now that I let Knoppix make a new vfat file system for it, it works fine in both Knoppix and Windows, inserted on boot or not.

My bet is that something else happened to make it work, and I suspect that you may be misattributing the change to the time at which it is inserted. Just a guess, anyway.

jd