I'm trying to mount my flash drive so I can make it a "persistant home directory" for knoppix. If I look in the USB viewer it shows my flash drive as being there. If I do fdisk -l though I only get the harddrives. If i try the mount command such as "mount /dev/sda1 /home/knoppix/Desktop" I get "mount: /dev/sda1 is not a valid block device" I have no idea what this means or how to get it to mount to the desktop correctly. I have seen a bunch of things online, but nothing that i can either understand or seem to get working specifically for knoppix.

Are you running a newer release of Knoppix? I just downloaded the lastest release, don't remember the version, but it was released within the past couple months. There should be a knoppix icon on the taskbar(also in the Kmenu) and that should have a link for the "persistant home" and "system configuration". When you hit either one of those, does your USB drive show up as one of the selections? While I'm thinking of it, has the USB drive been formatted? Most thumb drives and such are formatted as Fat32(which is fine) while others may not be formatted at all. If I remember correctly, the "not a valid block device" refers to the file system of the drive you're trying to access.

hmm, if memory serves me correctly it was formatted when i first started using it. It does not show up in the menu when I go to choose a home location. Only my hd shows up in the menu. Is there something wrong with the fat32 file system that knoppix doesn't like? or is there another way to mount the drive so I can get it as an option for a home directory? Knoppix is version 3.9

A Fat32 format should work just fine and Knoppix 3.9 is the same version I'm running. you might try That will atleast let you take a look at you drive and what format it is. AAHH!! I just noticed that in your first post you said you were trying mount /dev/sda1. For whatever reason, I had to use /dev/uba1, as that's what Knoppix was assigning to my thumb drive. You might want to give that a shot. Once you get your configs and your home directory setup on your USB drive, you'll just have to run this at boot...