Why doesn't knoppix 3.9 read my harddrive?
 

I am a new user to linux, and i am having some difficulties. I boot from a cd, and linux won't read my hard drive. When i click on the icon that represents my harddrive, after five minutes this is the message that it gives. . .

Could not mount device, the reported error was. . .
Mount: I could not determine the filesystem type and none was specified.

I have done nothing at all to solve this problem so far.What could I do to fix this?

Dose your drive have a file system or is it new? If it is new, or you don't care about anything prviously on it, you will have to partition it before you can mount it. There should be a partioning service on the install cd to do so.

If you have a file system currently on it and data you want to keep, you will be unable to use it as a drive if it is NTFS.

Yes, my drive does have a file system, and it is NTFS. I do not care about anything on the drive. Can I reformat it with linux, and change the file system to fat or fat32?

Yes. You want to do that, as linux does not currently support writing to NTFS officially, and even unofficially it works spotilly with high risk of corruption/dta loss.

I recently formatted my drive into fat32, now the problem is installing 3.9 on to the hard drive. I have tried some things already that just haven't worked. I first tried the tohd=/dev/hda1 Cheat, but that didn't work. Then I tried the
Knoppix lang=us 2 Code and that didn't work. Is there another way??

I appreciate any help that is given, I really like Linux and would love to get it running on my HD, Thanks a lot.

Umm...Are you saying that you formated the drive as fat32 and are now trying to put knoppix on that fat32 partition? That won't work, I've tried it once for fun. That's like installing windows on a ext2 partition....

It might be possible to get linux to install on a fat partition but that would trash all security of that system.
The partition that you are trying to install knoppix on make sure it is formated as ext2 or ext3.