I am running Linux 4.0 on a Toshiba Laptop with a one-partition hard drive, Windows XP Home, and two external usb 2.0 disks. I load Linux from the CD and it recognizes all the drives. I click on the laptop hard drive and one of the external drives, set all the preferences to read-write and remove the read only check in the device tab, and then try to create a new folder on the usb drive by clicking the Edit tab and then the create new folder tab. I get the naming box, put in WinBack and click ok. I then get a message saying "could not make folder mnt/ubb1/winback." My goal is to copy a bunch of files from the C Drive (the laptop hard drive) to the external drive. Thank you. Alan

It could be a permissions thing. As it being a live CD means you can't edit the inittab, try doing the whole thing as root.

Remember that if the external drive is formatted using NTFS, then it is read-only. Suppose that it is fat32; take a look at the "man mount" manpage. If you open up a console, and su to root, you can use the "remount" option to change the mount options. For example, you could use "umask=000" or if your username is akkaplan, you could use the "uid=akkaplan" option.

Thanks for the responses. A clarification: I'm running Knoppix 4.0 on the laptop and trying to create the new folders using Konqueror desktop. I don't know whether this changes anything. Sorry for the confusion. I'm completely new to Linux and the terminology is still pretty baffling.

Open up a console and type 'su' to get into root. As root, make a folder you want to mount your usb drive, then make it writable for the user you want to give access:
then open up your /etc/fstab in a text editor and make sure the line that mounts this drive is correct, if there is none, add it.
this assumes a) your usb drive is fat32 (ntfs is read only), and b) the device name to your disk is /dev/sda1. Usb hard disks are usually called by this name but you can do 'fdisk -l' to be sure.

You can then issue the command 'mount /mnt/usbdrive' to mount it. Anything you save to this folder will be stored on the usb drive. If you don't want it to automatically mount at boot time, add the line 'noauto' to the options.

regards,
...drkstr