Hi! I have a very strange problem with Knoppix 3.8.1. Any attempts to access the partition table on the hard drive in my Toshiba Satellite Pro cause the process to hang. It appears to be exactly the same problem described in this thread. I even ran strace as the original poster did and it shows fdisk siezing up in the exact same place. The trace seems to indicate that the read() system call is never returning. This seems extremely strange to me. Previous versions of Knoppix have worked fine, up to and including 3.7. Is this a weird bug in the new kernel or something else? Does anyone have any clue? The hard drive in question has only Linux partitions (one ext3 and one swap) as it's got a Mandrake Linux 10.1 install on it. So it has nothing to do with NTFS, as the original poster originally thought. The problem is obviously at a lower level than that, but at which level, I have no idea.