I have burned and booted Knoppix 4.0 - at first, the boot stalled at the PCMCIA stage so I used the cheatecode no PCMCIA and it booted successfully. I have been and purchased a Toshiba 320Gb external HDD which I plugged in via USB prior to booting up Knoppix.

When the desktop appears I am able to mount the hda1 and sda1. I have also made them both write enablled. However when I click on actions menu ' change read write mode on the mounted Toshiba drive I get a warning dialogue saying the partition type is NTFS and to try using the Captive-ntfs driver via Knoppix utilities (which isn't included in v4.0 I have noted from other posts). The result is I can see all of my data I wish to recover from my laptop HDD but I have no way of copying it to the external HDD. When I try to copy from the hda1 to sda1 I get a message saying could not make folder. I have checked that all the write enable boxes and menus are checked.

please help I feel so near and yet so far. Also I am a complete newbie to Linux so please be gentle with your replies. I am assuming that this must have happened to someone else!