This may or may not be related. I tried the Knoppix 5.0.1 on my notebook with a n external hard drive attached by firewire. After the DVD booted it showed two partition icons for the internal hard drive, hda1 and hda5 and also an icon for sda1, the external drive. I can open either internal partition just fine (one NTFS, one FAT32). But when I try to open sda1 I get an error message that says that Knoppix is unable to determine the partition type to mount sda1 and that none was provided. It is a NTFS partition, and when I wwent back to XP I could again use the drive just fine.