I realize that not everyone has a technical knowledge of formatting, although I expect that when the terms formatting, NTFS and FAT are thrown out, most people who don't know them will Google the terms and gain any needed information.

Good luck on reformatting the drive as FAT32. Once you do that you should be able to transfer files to it safely. However, Knoppix may by default mount the new partition in read-only mode. You might need to remount the drive in read-write mode. To get more information on this, type man mount at a command prompt.