I am an utter newbies, and havent even finished reading the manuals yet!

Thanks to Partition Magic 8, my Desktop with Knoppix installed has crashed.
So I tried loading it from the cd on my laptop.

The laptop has 3 USB ports, and I have a 128 MB USB stick. However, this works unreliably with Windows XP, and I have been advised to reinstall XP from scratch.

However, before doing this, I wondered if the stick would be recognized/work with Knoppix run from the CD but not installed on the hard disk (yet).

Is it HDA5, SDA1, or what? If I click on a non-existent drive, Knoppix hangs. Must I first mount it, and how? Of course, booting Knoppix from the CD I do not have a root password.

If I have to install Knoppix on the hard disk first, how do I then proceed to access the USB stick? Is it automatically mounted, or not?