Using Knoppix to transfer files to USB Drive

[dariogi]

I booted Knoppix and i want to transfer my files to USB Drive, is it possible if so where do i Start and how do i do it...

[Harry Kuhman]

Maybe. Depends.

What is the USB drive? Is it a simple flash device, with some form of fat format? If so you very likely can do it. If it's a external hard drive and formatted with NTFS then the answer is pretty much no. You may find some people here that will tell you that you can write to that NTFS drive, but I would suggest that you have very good backups of everything on the drive before you try anything they suggest.

If it's a device with a FAT partition, plug it in before booting Knoppix and look for a desktop icon fot the partition (you can also read the man page for the mount command). See answer #6 for details. Also be sure to shut down Knoppix or unmount the drive before unplugging it from the USB connection.

[dariogi]

I got fat partiotion usb drive (stick) i plug it in when my pc is turned off, i turn on my pc, boot knoppic on cd, and i dont see anyhting on my desktop execpt now the light on my usb stick is on...

[Harry Kuhman]

Normally Knoppix will find it and create a desktop icon for any partition that it can access. I don't have enough infornation to know why it's not doing so in your case. It should likely show up as sda1, if there are no internal SATA or SCSI drives. You might want to try the mount command and see if you can get Knoppix to mount it that way, although if Knoppix didn't mount it automatically I expect that there is some reason that you'll have to discover. Is this a plain and simple usb flash drive, or does it have some curse "security" features involved with it that might cause it to be a Windows-only device? Tell us lots more about your drive and your system if you want us to be able to offer more help, Is this the only computer that you have? Have you tried this with Knoppix on other computers with the same result? Do you see icons on the desktop for hard drive partitions?

[dariogi]

Umm, sda1 and sda2 are already taken, these are my hard disks, I got laptop... How do i manually mount it, pls tell me how to do it. Anyways if i only got 1 cd rom is there a way i can burn it using same cd rom even tho i use my cd rom to boot knoppix.

[Harry Kuhman]

Umm, sda1 and sda2 are already taken, these are my hard disks, I got laptop........

Generally you would only have sda1, but some laptops do waste file space with a rcovery partition. That should be on an extended partition and so should be sda5 but I've seem some strange things done with recovery partitions. In any case, this isn't your problem, Knoppix would just move the drive to sdb1 or sdc1 (if sdb1 is needed for the optical drive).

...How do i manually mount it, pls tell me how to do it. ...

Read the man page on mount (open a shell and type man mount . You may have to experiment with sdb1 or sdc1 as the partition to mount. I would first try to mount read only before trying to make it read-write.

.... Anyways if i only got 1 cd rom is there a way i can burn it using same cd rom even tho i use my cd rom to boot knoppix.

First of all, if you have a CD instead of a DVD, what version of Knoppix are you running? The current version, 5.3.1 is only available officially on DVD. There is a 5.1.1. CD that should work fine for you. But if you have a very old version of Knoppix (such as 3.1) that might explain the problem opening the flash drive.

Beyond that, if you have a CD and have at least 1 gig of RAM then you could use the toram cheat code, which would free up the optical drive for writing. With less memory it's a lot harder to do this with Knoppix, and the Knoppix CD is too full for another session. I would suggest using a different live CD such as Puppy Linux which is a lot smaller. This gives you two different options: One would be to write the data to a second session on the same CD (yea, this works, I've done it), and the other is to use Pupply linux with the toram option, load all of puppy in a lot less ram and then swap in a blank writable disc.

You're still not putting any effort into identifying your hardware, so that's about all that I can tell you.

[dariogi]

anyways i dont want to do it with cd. Then i boot with my pc it finds 5 drives including my USB drive... on laptop i tried all 3 ports and it wont recognize, so what's the problem? btw i dont know what version i got but it ~ 2006 release.

[dariogi]

manually mountin is too hard for me. do you know what exactly i have to put in there cuz its really confusing... somethin like mount .... and idk what the rest stands for

[chip.ling]

manually mountin is too hard for me. do you know what exactly i have to put in there cuz its really confusing... somethin like mount .... and idk what the rest stands for

You should be able to do it from the GUI desktop. By the way what version of knoppix you are using?

Rgds,
Chip

[OErjan]

uhm, manually mounting the disk? should not be needed, but if you want to try... type

sudo su&&mkdir /mnt/device&&mount -t filesystem /dev/device /mnt/device&&exit

where filesystem is replaced with either vfat, ntfs, or whatever you have on that disk (USB pendrive is most likely vfat) if you had linux on that disk beofre possibly, reiserfs, ext2, ext3, JFS and many more.

device is replaced with the device "name" it gets when plugged in, leave it unplugged and when knoppix is fully booted open a console and type

dmesg

now note what the last 10-15 lines read, plug in the disk wait a few min open a new console next to the one you just opened and type dmesg, there should now be lines there not present in the first window. you should see something like this.

scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access SigmaTel MSCN 0100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 487936 2048-byte hardware sectors (999 MB)
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 3e 00 00 00
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 487936 2048-byte hardware sectors (999 MB)
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 3e 00 00 00
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdb: sdb1
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
sd 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
usb-storage: device scan complete

in this case sdb1 is what I would type as disk name.

keep asking.