My only experience with linux is running some basic command line programs and copying stuff on a linux machine accessed through a windows secure shell program (putty), so i'm not exactly familiar with how the linux system works.

My old and sluggish winxp desktop with only 256mb of ram recently crashed on me and refused to boot up, so I tries to use knoppix to rescue my precious stuff on the hard disk. But while navigating through the files, i found that browsing through the partition is really slow (ok that's normal considering the RAM size) and the kconquerer hangs. I tried to copy some files from the partition to a FAT32 usb harddisk, but because i didn't set the read-write permissions correctly, of course i wansn't successful.

After a online source taught me to set read-write permissions with right click and selecting "propertites" (somehow selecting "change read/write ...." option doesn't work?) at least i could create new folders in the usb drive. However, i also tried out write-enabling the ntfs partition i was trying to save, and suddenly while browsing for the file i need, kconquerer just hanged and i could hear the disk spinning HARD. I tried to mount/unmount the partition but the drive (or is it partition?) was "busy". That's when i resort to the "reboot drill" (I thought only windows needs that?) and tried again.

This time i was able to use kconquerer to open up the drive for a short time, but after i enabled writing to my usb drive (which opened up a new window), the kconquerer window that had the partition hanged up again. after i terminated the program, I couldn't mount it up again. I forgot what error i got at this point, but i remember something about not able to find the drive or something (gosh, so stupid of me not to take it down). And right now, it is reporting error "could not mount [hdc] I could not determine the filesystem type and none was specified." although it happens also after enabling read/write to my usb drive

Please help me with this? it's late in the night for me (1am infact) so i havn't done much troubleshooting to this, but i hope this information can help? is it a problem with my harddrive or the lack of RAM that's causing it? I've yet to try doing it by command line.

Thanks for your help ^_^