new user - need help

[Markus]

Oh, then that dirve needs to be partitoned to use.

Try sudo qtparted with it plugged in.

Having never used an unpartitioned usbdisk, doesn't it say anything in dmesg when you plug it in?

thanks everyone for the help posted so far. here is the update. i went ahead and pulled my laptop hard drive out. i tried to buy a converter from laptop harddrive to desktop. instead the guy sold me this he said i could just move the files. it worked for some files and not for others. the files that transferred were the ones in my shared directory. the ones that didnt transfer were within my documents folder.

Heh, they often try to sell you something different from what you're asking.
What are you using to transfer, windows? Then it's a permission thing and you might still want to try knoppix unless you're copying to an NTFS disk.