Quote Originally Posted by dav2900
..... external USB 400 Gb HDD formatted as FAT32.
... Hard Disc (uba) [/mnt/uba]
however when I click on it, it gives me this error:

mount: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified.
Please check that the disk is entered correctly.

I have another ext 80 Gb HDD but that is NTFS. Knoppix lets me read that one but I can't write to it so the 400 Gb FAT32 HDD is my only hope here!!
400 gigs is absolutely huge for a FAT32 partition. And larger than many external IDE drive boxes support. Did you perhaps load any special driver software into your Windows system when you set up this 400 gig monster that Knoppix doesn't know about? That might account for why Knoppix isn't seeing it properly. And what flavor of Windows did you format it with? I've found the hard way that I can't trust switching drives between even Win98 and WinXP without risking corrupting data, so if there is data on that 400 gig drive I would think twice about writing to it with a system that doesn't recognize the format. If your sure that everything is right with this drive and the drive itself is showing up as uba then the primary partition on the drive should be "uba1". You might try using the mount command and telling it what the partition type is (as well as that you want it mounted read/write). See man mount from a shell prompt for details.

One handy thing, as least for me, is how easy it is to change the drive in an external drive box. So in this case if you have any other smaller driver available you might want to swap one into the box and see if Knoppix can do any better with it. That's certainly the approach I would take, but if you don't have a spare smaller drive it might not be an option.