Thank you for all the replies.

I have managed to start the copy process. I did the following:

- turn off windows firewall
- allow write access to 'everyone' to a specific share on the windows machine
- used KNetAttach under Internet to map the shared folder
- then just used Knoppix to copy the files, it is still copying but is working, transfer rate is OK but not great. It sat idle for quite a while asking if I wanted to skip a tmp file that windows had left open