I can try to mount the drive with -rw, but you are right when you say that creating the file would mess up the NTFS drive. But what if I have already created the file, and knoppix reads and writes to the file without changing the size? My understanding is that this is ok as long as you don't try to change the size of the drive.

So I guess I want to know how to point to a persistent home in knoppix without going through the creation script. I would also need to know what is on the persistent home (is it a file formatted as ext2?) I think if I did this, Knoppix could use the file as long as it booted with write permission.

This is a lot of stuff, but I would like to try. Can anyone give me some info on wat kind of file the persistent home is, and how I can read and write to this file on NTFS right from the bootup?