Dear Robert,
I'm very sorry for having been silent so long. I know it's not serious, but I had very good reasons: my wife delivered our second child a week ago, so it's a long time I'm not going in the PC classroom where I did the previous tries.

However, I created a NTFS partition on my laptop (so, no problem for the USB keyboard) and I made a test which provided interesting (but undesired) results.

I made a persistent home, rebooted, and I wrote something on the persistent
home. Then, I rebooted as you suggested by using the cheatcode
knoppix noswap 1
and I've ran ntfsfix on the NTFS partition.
Then, I rebooted once again by scanning for the persistent home.

No chance! Knoppix still complains and requires to run the windows utility
to check and fix the NTFS partition.....

I've retried in order to be sure I was not wrong: same result!


The problem seems without a straight solution: isn'it?

I will try also by using FUSE, Mark's suggestion looks very interesting, but may be too difficult for students.


Thanks a lot.
Ciao,
Ugo