If your trying to save data from a dying hard drive, consider getting a gmail account and emailing yourself the critically important stuff, rather than tryng to get knoppix to figure out your hardware. Gmail gives you 2 gigs of storage. Yahoo will give you another gig or so for free.

Otherwise how is your usb stick formatted? You could post the output (froom a root sheel) of fdisk -l, and maybe : df (disk free). Also : mount.

HTH