CounterZone,

I guess you missread my reply, or I didn't explain it well enough, my fault...

Knoppix will not save anything unless you tell it to.

Knoppix's Live CD will create a RAM DISK in memory, and use that for any files, and the OS, nothing should "touch" any drive you have on your system...

Only one thing will cause Knoppix's Live CD to "ever" touch a hard drive, is if you don't have enough memory for a ram disk - in that case - it might ask you to allow Knoppix to place a SWAP DISK file on a hard drive, so it can use the file for lack of memory - that is all.

The Knoppix Live CD, that is using the CD to boot Knoppix with, is VERY SAFE. The designers of the "Live CD" considered the CD to be extremely safe, to the point that even hard drives it detects on the system, are by default, mounted as READ ONLY. Not even Windows does that, as if they would ever release a OS that could even run off a CD.

I consider the Live CD to be safer than abstanance from sex, so, that is pretty much as safe as safe can get - with the CD, you are free from viris attacks, worms, intrusion attacks, etc... because the best any "nasty" thing can hope for is attaching to the system files, which, are stored in memory, and flushed, and reinstalled from the read only CD, that is way safe. Problems are when you want to "change" something, then you need to save, mount read/write hard drives, etc... in most of those cases, something "can" get in and attach.

Running the Live CD is pretty much as follows: Booting causes a ram disk to be created, OS and configs are then loaded to the ram disk (memory), when you shutdown, or reboot, the memory is cleared, and thus, nothing is maintained from your boot, other than what is on the CD (which should be viri, worm, and such, clean).

The nice thing with the Live CD is, if you trash your system, OS, (Knoppix boot that is), when running Knoppix booted off the CD, you just down the system, and boot off the CD again - nothing permanent - and if you don't save, or "touch" any of your drives, remove the CD and boot back to what you had booted before - no harm done.

The Live CD is safe, after installing it to your hard drive, then the "unsafe" part gets introduced - if you open your hard drives and begin "saving" things, or configurations, etc.. then it begins to get "unsafe". But, the Live CD alone, it very safe.

Hope this helps,
Cuddles