I have a crappy 64 mb USB 1.1 drive I got for free and would like to use to create a persistent home directory for Knoppix as well as save my settings onto. I've been running into trouble because I can't seem to format the disk as ext2 or ext3 or any other writable linux partition. Both cfdisk and fdisk can't see the drive. Also when you anwser this I would also like to know about any sort of tools for viewing linux partitions in Windows.

USB drives are shown as SCSI devices in Linux. Most likely your usbdrive is /dev/sda1. I would personally keep it FAT because that way you'll be able to use it in Windows machines also. Writing to a FAT filesystem is no problem in Linux, just make sure you mount it writeable. If you do decide to convert it to ext2 or 3, you have to start (c)fdisk with cfdisk /dev/sda or such.

Well I did find where it was mounted
But cfdisk and fdisk wouldn't let me mount it


I had tried FAT32 and NTFS but not FAT yet

I'll give that a shot and write back

Ok the FAT file system works like a dream, however now all my files are stored under a file called knoppix.img

Is there anyway to open this in Windows and access the files?

FAT32 should work also (it's just a variant of FAT). Furthermore, you should probably use -t VFAT option with your mount command to enable filenames longer than 8+3 characters.

Can't help you with knoppix.img though because I have no experience in Knoppix. If you mount your usbdrive (be it /dev/sda1 or whatever) to for example /mnt/usbdrive, I see no reason why the files would be placed under some strange .img file. Sounds extremely strange to me... This is certainly not standard behaviour, must be some knoppix oddity. Could you tell me exactly how you mount the drive under linux and what software you use to access it?

Well I just make sure everything is hooked up then I type at the boot screen for Knoppix

Well there's your problem then It seems that with your boot parameters sda1 gets mounted to /mnt/sda1, so you could just try saving your files to /mnt/sda1 instead of your home directory. Not sure if this works, but try it.

OR you could bootup your knoppix first without all the myconfig=/mnt/sda1 home=sda1 stuff. Then after it's booted, mount the usbdrive with normal mount command: mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 -o uid=[yourusername]. It won't be your home directory then (instead you can access it from /mnt/sda1), but at least the files will be readable in other systems too. Not sure what will happen to your changes to system settings then...

OR you could just try leaving the last home=sda1 part away from your boot parameters and use /mnt/sda1 to save your files (I would think it will get mounted, but if not, use the above mount command).

Knoppix seems to use this strange .img file because of your boot parameters. Don't ask me why, because to me it seems plain stupid... It could just as well just save the files directly to the filesystem. I guess there is a reason for this, but you have to ask it from someone who knows knoppix better than I do.

Hope you get it working, good luck

I think it had to do with the fact that I'm not using a linux filesystem. Either that or it's some kind of compression.

I would suspect the prior. I think it wants to manage file permissions correct and of course this is not possible with FAT (since it doesn't have permissions). However using FAT filesystem is possible without such tricks, you just need to set the file permissions and ownership when mounting the filesystem and you cannot change them later.I think that the .img file is actually a ext2/3/reiserfs filesystem that can be mounted using a loop device on linux. Unfortunately there is no way (at least to my knowledge) with which you could handle such files under other operating systems. Did you manage to get it working the way you wanted?