Quote Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman
Knoppix by default will make that "open" a read-only open. It deliberately will resist writing to any hard drive withf either FAT or NTFS partitions. The restriction on not writing to FAT can safely be overwritten (I have done this many thines). Some people have managed to over ride the restriction on NTFS as well, but ....

I say it is not safe because after years of watching this forums and years of people reporting corrupted NTFS partitions after writing to them with Knoppix, I've come to believe that it is not safe. I've seen one report after another that "now Knoppix can finally write to NTFS", only to find it was premature and that problems still exist. More recently I've seen some talk of using an alternate hard disk driver that might work properly, but Knoppix is still defaulting to the dangerous one that will corrupt a partition. I don't know how to use the alternate hard disk driver and be certain that I'm even not using the known dangerous driver, so I have to believe that someone who calls himself computerdummy doesn't know how to do that either.

He is not going to be able to create an extra FAT32 partition on the disk, for the simple reason that virtually all disks are going to be just about 100% partitioned, no reseller or average user leaves an extra 100 gig lying around for some future partition.

If the external drive had no needed data on it and could be completely reformatted as FAT32 (erasing any files on it) then this recovery could be done safely. I don't know the state of that drive and would not want to suggest any operation that would cause even more loss of data. I thought that what I had posted and a bit of common sense should be enough to let one decide the next move for themselves.
I am indeed "average" when it comes to computers but I would hardly call knowing that all disks are already partitioned (or what partitioning means) and to reformat to FAT32 as common sense...but I do appreciate the help, honestly.

I'll just go ahead and clear the external drive of all files and then reformat to FAT32 and transfer my files over. I hope I'm not missing any other foreseeable common sense issues. thanks again guys