The process spelled out by Rumo is what Kyle Rankin describes in his book Knoppix Hacks and how I share /home between various Linuxes and BSDs. (For adding distros after the first, though, you only copy over what's new so that you don't clobber what's already there.)

As McGyver points out, you can boot straight into your installation as root so long as you haven't changed root's home directory to /home. Be sure not to su or sudo into root, though, because then you'll still be in /home.

Knoppix in fact rebuilds /etc/fstab on every boot - you can see this in /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig and in the blue and yellow message it generates at boot time saying, "Scanning for Harddisk partitions and creating /etc/fstab..."

Klaus Knopper designed Knoppix to be a replacement for a laptop - he wanted a portable work environment that he could run wherever he was, just by sticking a CD into whatever computer was nearby.

From that point of view, rebuilding /etc/fstab each time is absolutely necessary. Once Knoppix is installed to a hard drive, though, it becomes more of a bug than a feature.

To disable it, you can include the boot parameter (cheatcode) nofstab along with lang=us or vga=791 or whatever else you use at startup.

-- Ed