Hi everyone. I'm new to this forum and new to linux.

I tried using Knoppix and it seems to have caused problems:

My computer is running Win XP Pro.

C: drive is formatted with NTFS.

I have 2 external USB hard drives attached (FAT32 formatted).

I put in a Knoppix CD (just to see how that OS looked) and booted my computer from it. The boot process started by describing the hardware it detected: RAM, CPU, video card,etc. Then the screen went blank. After about half-hour I assumed the Knoppix boot failed so I turned my computer off and rebooted into Windows.

Now I can't access one of my external USB drives (the other one is OK). When I try to look at the contents of the drive, I get the error message: "the drive is not formatted."

Sometimes, I get the error, "operation on \device\harddisk2\dr5 was not completed before the time-out period expired."

I had about 100 gb of stuff saved on that drive. Did Knoppix reformat it in a Linux format, like Ext2?

I also read that Knoppix cannot write to an NTFS drive so does it try to repartition your existing drives? Or does it somehow lock your hard drives?

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any help.

I'll be away for a couple of days and then I'll check back here.