It's interesting that you mention "too big" as the other computer that this drive is on has a single 160g partition (a bit big for my tastes but it's not my comp either). Also I have another drive that is 120g size that seems to work fine.

Unfortunately I am a user of large partitions (I prefer about 100g partitions) when I can so shrinking isn't gonna be nice to run with under my current primary OS (win2k)

ah well, thanks very much for the help peoples, I have picked up quite a bit. Guess knoppix isn't quite ready for my personal everyday use yet, but I will jump on the next release fast. my other problem is the sound card isn't being detected (got some ideas to fix that already) but if I can't read storage devices then sound doesn't matter, heh

so far btw, knoppix is the closest linux I have played with that I would put money on. I have tried redhat but I don't like gnome (mostly cause it crashed 2 times for me and failed to fully recover, stable releases both) and kdd is more comfy too I have also tried a few fun text based ones but I don't think I would use a text based OS after so much time with a graphical one...

oh, on a side question related to this problem, what the heck is a superblock?