Quote Originally Posted by sidnelp
.... I'm in the middle of final week at school and have a presentation that needs to be ready for tomorrow. It's a large file and will require around 645MB. I understand Knoppix has the burning software......
Knoppix has burning software, but unless you have a lot of ram or a second CD drive that is also a CD writer, then you have an extra problem - you need the Knoppix CD in the drive toactually be running Knoppix.

Here are some quick suggestions on how to work around this: If you are on a network and you can transfer the file to another machine, do that with Knoppix. If you have acces to a 1 gig flash menory stick, put it in the system when Knoppix boots, right click on hard drive sda1 and select mount, right click again on hard drive sda1 and select action and pick the choice that makes the device read-write (it defauls to read only for safety). Then you can copy the file there. Use the browser to transfer the file to a website like www.yousendit.com, who will hold it there for up to seven days while you set up to get it back (this will require that your connection is fast enough to make the upload and later download reasonable).

If none of the above seem like they will work for you, here's another work around for the Knoppix must be in the CD drive problem: Use a distro of a live CD that is much smaller than Knoppix. I would suggest Damn Small Linux. It's only about 50 meg and has a CD burner in it as well. There are two ways you could use it: One would be to use the toram option to copy all of it to ram; that should let you take out the CD and insert a blank that you can write to. The second, the one I've actually done, is to write the iso as the first sesion of a multi-session CD. Be sure that "finalize the CD" is not checked. You can use this CD to boot into Damn Small Linux. Then, with the CD still in the drive, you can run the burning software. I forget the name, but it's all command line based and very easy to use (as long as you are not in a panic). I had a CD burnt in just a few minutes. You burn the files that you want to the second session of the CD. Sounds like they will just fit in the remaining 650 megs of a 700 meg CD with a few megs left over. The result is a CD with both DSL and the recovered files on it. This CD is no longer bootable, but it holds the recovered data.

Good Luck.