How shall I migrate to the DVD version?

[Harry Kuhman]

I don't know if the LBA that you are mentioning is the same media descriptor byte that MS is mentioning here Floppy Disk is Not Accessible, Not Formatted, or Not Recognized by Windows

Nope. That was an interesting link, I wasn't aware of that issue, but it seems to be a different issue. What I saw between Win95 and Win98 was a LBA issue (Logical Block Addressing, a hack that has been added because modern drives had too many real cylinders to fit in with the MS way of accessing hard drives). It should not affect floppy drives. I'm guessing, but only guessing, that what corrupted the FAT partition between Win98 and XP was also an LBA issue. But whatever it was, it's there, and I don't move drives between Win98 and XP any more.

Will Knoppix see my firewire external hard drive

For some reasons Kno 3.8 and up have a hard time to detect my USB and firewire devices, incluing my External HD. (I haven't make a post yet, but I will in a future). My workaround is start Kno and unplug/replug the device.

Thanks for that tip. I may also try just backing up to my 3.7 copy of Knoppix and hope that it supports the DVD burner.

I have burned ISOs from the External HD before, but I don't know about your DVD burner.

Nor do I. Coud experiment now but I might as well wait until I have the ISO. Just considering all my options at this point since it looks like I'll have to put a bit more work into this than I normally do to burn an ISO.

How did you do it without loose your data? Did you use a paid software?

Unfortunately, yes. I have a friend that owns a copy of Partition Magic. Since it was a notebook system it was easy enough to carry it to his place and shrink the partition. Made a backup first though, always a good move when doing stuff like that.