I have never had a problem reading a NTFS partition under Knoppix. I only use standard English characters and have seen others post about problems with foregin characters, but you indicate that is not your problem. I have not done a lot of work with NTFS and version 5.3.1 of Knoppix, but I have no reason to expect it will be less able to deal with reading of NTFS partitions than previous versions. However, I never write to NTFS with Knoppix. Some people say it is safe, but this has been shown over and over again through the years to be a source of partition corruption. I don't know if 5.3.1 is any better or not, but I don't yet trust it, and since I expect that Microsoft may be actively fighting Linux NTFS compatibility with their "Security updates" I don't expect that I will trust it. If you are only trying to read the NTFS partition with Knoppix I would be interested in hearing more about the problem. But if you have written to NTFS with Knoppix and now find that the NTFS partition is showing signs of corruption, I'm not very surprised.

By the way, if the NTFS partition is corrupted, that doesn't have to be caused by Linux. We see lots of people who come to this forum trying to recover data from NTFS partitions who only heard about Knoppix and started using Linux after XP corrupted it's own partitions. I've seen XP corrupt disks that I never accesses with Knoppix and still have several drives that I can't recover files from.