Two things:-

1). A brand new drive may be unformatted and with no partition table, you need to use a tool like QTparted or similar to make a partition and then format that partition.

2). Knoppix boot from CD does not mount drives as read-write - only read only, this is to help inexperienced users from destroying stuff, or attempting to write to NTFS partitions (a define no-go)

If it's just the latter, you can remount a drive using:-

mount -o remount,rw /dev/hdax

- Hope this helps a bit.

I'm a noob, so hopefully others will reply and help (or correct me if I'm wrong!)

Stoo.....