I did not mean to confound you, Miss Cuddler. Nor was it my intention to make unreasonable demands of the Knoppix forum's or your own computer knowledge since I thought I had a common "newbie" problem. In other words, I didn't expect any noodles to be seriously scratched. Thanks to all who have helped me so far.

Like I said, I can't find any files on my hard drive and there is no HDD icon on the desktop. What is my problem and what is the cause? Has this ever happened to anyone else before? What's a kernel?