I've searched for this problem but can't find anything that matches this problem, so sorry if this has been answered before.

I've used Unix in the past, but not for a few years, so I'm really a newbie once again. Trying to rescue data from a drive that won't boot into Windows xp using the Knoppix CD, I see the damaged windows partition has been mounted and I can read its data. If I connect a second HD or a usb flash drive, these also appear on the desktop. The problem is making them writable partitions. I can copy files to a floppy disk but not to the another HD or flash drive.

I set the permissions on the partitions to r/w/x, removed the write-protect checkmark in the file system property screens, and set the owner to user, but the os still tells me I don't have write permission. How do you make a partition writable (if that's the real problem here)?

Can anyone point me in the right direction?