Thanks for reading this post.

Why can I see my Windows files in Knoppix under 'hda1'? That's very scary to me, because I thought the safety of Knoppix came from the fact that it treated the Knoppix drive as a separate partition, so no matter how badly I screw up Knoppix can never see, harm or manipulate anything I have under my Windows drive.

I thought the point of a partition is COMPLETE 100% independence between drives. Is this not the case, or is it the case but Knoppix is not really meant to be simulating a partition?

Can somebody please explain what exactly a partition is, what its implications are, and whether Knoppix is actually simulating a partitioned drive while the LiveCD is in your drive?

Apparently it only has read-only access to the Windows files, but still, the answers to all my questions above totally escape me.

Thanks a lot!

Knoppix can see the Windows drive because it's mounted.
Unmount it and it wont be able toThe actual "drive" that Knoppix is running in/on is stored in RAM.

Plus your windoze drive is mounted in read-only mode in Knoppix by default, so you can't write to the windoze drive unless you change the write permissions.

A partition is a logical piece of a drive. It is also physically contiguous, that is, it is not dispersed across the drive in bits and pieces, rather, it is one "chunk" of the drive.

The point of a partition is that if you screw up *one* partition, you can wipe it out without affecting data on any *other* partition. However, they do not provide complete, 100% independence. For instance, it is a common practice to put "/home" on a separate partition on a Linux install. This way, if you have to reinstall your OS, for whatever reason, you don't lose any of your *personal* data.

Any OS can "see" files on any partition formatted with a filesystem that it can understand, as long as that partition is mounted on that OS's filesystem. Thus, Windows can have multiple "drives" (really partitions) like C:, D:., E:, etc. on a hard disk, that it "maps" (mounts) to the filesystem, but it can't by default see Linux-filesystem partitions. Linux, OTOH, understands Windows filesystems, so it can mount virtually any partition you will have on your home PC.

Thus, it is up to the computer operator to not mount, or unmount, any partitions they do not want to have available for access, and mount as read-only any partitions which contain data to be read, but not written to.

Your other question has already been answered: Knoppix's "partition" is actually just in RAM.