So my Vista installation will not boot on my laptop and I wanted to recover my files and then do a complete recovery install. So I came across Knoppix and I have it successfull running through a USB drive on the laptop. I borrowed an external HDD and I hooked it up to the laptop via USB and I can access it fine through Knoppix.

However, when I right clicked it and tried to change read/write mode, it gave me an error saying unable to change because another process may be accessing the filesystem. I also tried right clicking>properties> and then unchecking the box that says "read only". Now, the HDD shows up as being writable, however it will not mount. It gives me an error saying "Could not mount device.....Mount is denied because NTFS is unclean. Choose one of these actions...." and it goes on to list 3 actions like boot in windows and shutdown, run ntfsfix unless you have vista then mount ntfs with force option read-write, or mount ntfs with ro option in readonly mode.

Please help me mount and write!
Thanks