Thanks Dave. I did some backup last night, thanks entirely to Knoppix and Cedrick Shock's First Aid article, which I referenced above. Using these tools, I was at least able to burn "My Documents", some TurboTax and Quicken data, and some smaller files. Of course, what I would really like to do is to copy them onto hdb as you suggest, especially since some of my files are video files that are too large to fit on a CD-RW. Apparently, K3B doesn't support DVD+R/RW, and I could not find any application on Knoppix which does (might have something to do with Dr. Knopper's assessment that everyone cannot afford a DVD burner). As my ISP can only be accessed via Windows, I'm kind of stuck with the programs that are already available on the Knoppix CD. As far as your question about another HD, BIOS blew off both of my HDs simultaneously, and both were set up to be bootable, so it's not an issue of one HD.

BUT, I STILL DESPERATELY NEED HELP! Using Qtparted, I re-partitioned the large NTFS-formatted hdb8 into two smaller FAT32 partitions (hdb8 and 9) of approximately 30 GB each. I'll need these for my video files that are too large to burn. But I still couldn't use the partitions once I created them. I presume it's because they still need to be formatted as FAT32.

HOW DO YOU FORMAT A PARTITION IN KNOPPIX?? I couldn't find it anywhere in Help. Here's the error I get when I tried to copy files from hda2 over to hdb8:

could not mount hdb8

mount wrong fs type, bad option, bad superlock on /dev/hdb8
or too many mounted disk systems.

I assume this is due to the need to format the drive. I already checked the box to make it writable and checked all of the boxes in the properties.

Thanks for any and all assistance. I"M ALMOST THERE!