I picked up a SimpleTech External 500 GB HDD so that I could copy some files off my neighbors winders Laptop. The laptop boots to something called Dell MediaDirect (supposedly it allows you to play music or watch movies from the optical drive w/o booting to windows), but will not boot to windows. Dell support told her she needed a new HDD. I ran the Dell HDD diagnostics from the Dell Utilities CD. It indicated no problem w/the drive. I booted knoppix , and could see her files. I told her I could install Linux on it, and if that did not work for her she could still go back to windows. Anyway she wants to save her jpegs. The SimpleTech drive was recommended by a GWLUG member. The box says that it is winders and Mac compliant. I told the Fry's sales guy that I was using the drive w/Knoppix to copy files off the broken laptop. He said it would work w/Linux and if not, bring it back. Knoppix sees the external drive as sdb1 and the .exe that came on it. I can not drag and drop folders to it though. I get message "could not write to media sdb1/B000000.JPG" I tried draggingMy Documents to sdb1 and got message"Could not make folder /Media/sdb1/My Documents"

Maybe there is a Knoppix program that does the job? Perhaps this is a command line job? Maybe I should take it back and get an empty external rive shell and buy a drive to put in it?

The Laptop is running XP Home. Laptop was new 2 years ago. 120GB SATA drive.

The external drive is SimpleTech 500 GB USB Permissions are -rw-r--r--

I just noticed that File system is Auto. Whats that? and that the drive is not writable. Huh?

OK I understand that knoppix mounts sdb1 as unwritable. I right clicked on it and selected Change read/write mode. I get "Do you really want to change partition /dev/sdb1 (fuseblk) to be writeable?" I would like to be assured that I can now move the files before going on, as I do not want to do anything that would prevent my being able to return the drive.