Quote Originally Posted by Kustard
I redownloaded it via the torrent - loaded it up, worked first time with no problems!

Thanks a lot for the help - hopefully it should be fine now!

EDIT: Okay this part is probably painfully obvious - but when trying to copy files I am told 'you can not drop any items in a directory in which you do not have permission'. Is there any way of fixing this?
You talk of redownloading by a BitTorrent client and that things now work. Yet you never respond at all to my suggestions that you check the ISO that you originally downloaded with a simple md5 test. I suspect that you have never done a md5 test, and so you are just ignoring this. If that's the case and you're just going to ignore stuff that you have not done before or that you don't understand, then I suggest that Linux is not for you and you should just go back to Windows. If you are willing to learn something new then I think it would be important to know if the original ISO was good or not. The fact that it booted once, although in German and in failsafe mode, implies that it was good, but some of the errors that you had raises doubt. The downloading faq explains in pretty good detail about the md5 chechsum and gives you references to several different programs that will calculate the md5 sum, so I'm hard pressed to understand what the problem was here. And if you did check the original ISO (as well as the last one you downloaded) with an MD5 test, what did you learn? Don't leave us to draw implications from the clues that you did say.

I have been able to transfer files just fine to an external USB flash drive. I don't know what you are trying to transfer files to, but I previously suggested that if it is NTFS partitioned then you will have problems with it. Worst case is that you might even destroy the partition and anything already on it by trying to write to it. I suggested an alternative. I'm really starting to feel that this is another case of "I've never done that before so I'll just ignore the advice". I sure hope I'm wrong about that.