Thanks for the reply

I suspected as much and I do, in fact, value these particular data quite highly. I doubt I'm lucky enough to write to this disc and not corrupt the very files I'm concerned with.

Unfortunately, I do not have a network to make this really easy so I'm guessing my best bet now is a new hard drive reloaded with XP and a USB enclosure for my old drive for seamless file transfer. That's do-able enough.

I'll be back in a couple of days with some questions about a dual boot so I can run some purely windows software and begin my migration to one of the Linux families. This lightweight Knoppix is really impressive...I will probably move it to the new drive and begin my transition from it. I read you were somewhat unimpressed with this version but to a former Windows user it looks and test drives pretty well.

Maybe I'll download the last of the 5 series and have a look at the man mount documentation.

I went to sourceforge and looked up the PCMan guys hoping for documentation but did not find anything. Any suggestions where? I apologize for the "hold my hand" request but I'm brand new to this ... I'm a pretty quick study so I will try not to unduly burden you with things i can find. Seems like now when you run a search engine the signal to noise ratio can almost defeat you. I'm pretty sure there are excellent resources out there being obscured by the clamour.

Thanks again,
b.line