Well, I put Knoppix aside for a while, and came back to it last night. As a reminder, appx 4 gig of my 80 gig primary HD was partitioned out at the factory for WinXP & HP system recovery (as D:, FAT 32), with the rest of my primary drive partitioned in NTFS as C:, while the 80 gig NTFS slave HD I installed is G:. Knoppix can see G: (as hdb1) and D: (as hda1) but not C:, and I still don't know why.

OK, last night, I was in Windows, moving a bunch of directories and data from G: to C:. After I was done, I booted the Knoppix CD. As usual, hda1 was D:, hdb1 was G:, and no C: - no surprise. What was really weird, though, was that hdb1 displayed all the files and directories that I had cut from G: and pasted to C:. What's more, I could open those deleted files and directories in hdb1, as if they were still there!

I realize that deleting data in Windows doesn't really delete the data, but I thought that it somehow marked the data as deleted. Apparently, Knoppix doesn't care that it's marked deleted (at least in NTFS), and is able to read these files that Windows no longer can!

Spooky!

Sort of opens up a new world of possibilities for file recovery. Has anyone else encountered this???

Oh, one other factor which may enter into this - I have Norton SystemWorks installed on the computer. NSW alters somewhat the behavior of the recycle bin in Windows, leaving some files as "protected". Could it be that this has some role in these strange goings on??

Until I can get my arms around why Knoppix appears to behave in such a strange and unpredictable way w/r/t file management, I'm afraid to try a dual-boot HD install. Anyway, I've initiated a defrag on C: and G:, and we'll see if this answers any questions.