having trouble mounting my hard drive
 

i have XP on my pc and i boot from a cd running Knoppix STD and im trying to have read/write access to files on XP.

i (think) i understand that i have to make a directory before i mount so i try:

mkdir /dev/hda

that goes down fine so i try to mount now like this:

mount /dev/hda (or hda1) <-----it gives me and error saying can find it in /dev/fstab or something like that

i also tried many variations of the above but have had no luck :(

can someone help a noob out or give some examples or something...also i don't want to do a hard drive install of linux.

First, if your Windows XP partitions are formatted as NTFS, then you can only read them. Write support for NTFS is (to my knowledge) only experimental and not worth risking your data.

Second, the mkdir command you want to execute is something like:
mkdir /mnt/hda1

The device file should already exist (the mkdir command you listed above should not have worked).

Third, when mounting a device, you need to tell the system what device to mount, and where to mount it in the filesystem. So mount needs two arguments:
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

From that point on, you can access your drive's contents from the /mnt/hda1 directory. If your Windows XP partition is not hda1, then replace hda1 with whatever you need (hda2, hdb1, or whatever). When finished using the drive, make sure you remember to unmount it:
umount /mnt/hda1

If the mount command fails with an "unknown filesystem" error, the you need to specify which filesystem is on the device. You do that with the -t argument.

If your device was formatted with FAT32:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

If your device was formatted with NTFS:
mount -t ntfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

If you get an error saying the filesystem is not supported, then the kernel is not prepared to handle that particular filesystem. In that case, there's very little (if anything) you can do to work around it without getting overly complicated.

thx for the awesome post...havent tried it yet but will later..just 1 question...if i get Knoppix 3.4 with the new kernal does this mean i can read and write from my hd?

I honestly can't say because of two reasons:[list=1][*]I'm not sure if NTFS-write support in the 2.6 kernel is considered stable/reliable[*]The Knoppix maintainers would have to enable that option in the kernel configuration for the new version of Knoppix to have access to it[/list=1]
I would be shocked if NTFS-write support were finalized, and nobody on the forums posted messages saying as much. It's usually a big thing for people switching over or testing out Linux that somebody would post a "hooray" message.

The last time I used Knoppix, I believe it had full read support for FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS. It had full write support for FAT16 and FAT32. So, the only stumbling block is writing to NTFS.

That reminds me, the last time I used Knoppix, the desktop had an icon for each hard drive partition it detected. I remember being able to right-click on the icon and seeing an option to "remount this partition as read/write" or something to that effect. If your partition is NTFS, then it probably won't have that option. If it does, then again, write support would be experimental. Just thought I'd mention that; it might make your life simpler if you don't have to futz with all those other commands.