I had a "Unmountable Boot Volume" BSOD under WinXP. I needed the data recovered. I knew Knoppix was the way to go. That was the easy part. I thought I was going to be slick and copy the data onto my USB SimpleTech 512mb Flash Memory Stick (FMS) and be done. I tried under Knoppix 3.8 and it didn't work. I found several references that said it FMS didn't work in 3.8 so I spent 6 hours downloading 4.02 from Univ of Wisconsin.

4.02 was a huge disappointment! I expected plug and play like under Windows. No way. Matter of fact I could not even find a consistent way to mount the drive. Search Google yourselves and your will see lots of people with similiar experiences.

Finally, after trial and error, I got it mounted. Then I was told it was not a "block device". I did a DMESG | tail and saw that Knoppix could not find a filesystem to mount. Oy! this memory stick works right out of the package on Windows. Why is this so hard?

I finally solved the problem by formatting an old ide disk as FAT32 under WinXP using an external USB drive and copying the data to that.

Knoppix is a wonderful system which is why I am detailing my tale of woe. FMS are today's floppies. They have to be transportable between Windows and Linux if Linux is ever going to achieve parity with Windows.

I welcome comments. And, of course, instructions on how to read and write to a FMS under Knoppix.

Dennis.