Using an external USB drive

Knoppix supports two types of external USB hard drive:

Knoppix uses its built-in "USB Mass Storage" driver to support these drives. Both USB 1.1 and the faster USB 2.0 drives are supported. USB 1.1 drives work at 12 Mbits per second (about 1.5 megabytes per second). USB 2.0 drives work at up to 480 Mbits per second (about 60 megabytes per second).

A USB hard drive stick is a small device like a key fob. They are sometimes called USB pen drives. Many digital cameras also work as an external USB hard drive. Any digital camera will work provided it supports USB Mass Storage. Some digital cameras have to be put in "DSC Mode" to enable USB Mass Storage. To copy files onto an external USB hard disk drive:

  1. Insert the USB hard drive into any USB socket.

  2. After a short pause, an icon for each partition on the new drive will appear. In most cases there will be a single partition on the USB drive that covers the entire disk, so one new icon will appear.

  3. Click the USB drive's icon.

  4. Wait for a moment while it is "mounted".

  5. The files on the new partition will be displayed.

  6. Right-click on the icon of the USB drive.

  7. Click "Change read-write mode".

  8. Click "Yes".


  9. Drag and drop the files or folders that you want to copy into the window of the USB drive.

  10. Click "Copy Here".


  11. The files or folders will be copied.

  12. When copying has finished, close all open windows for the USB drive.

  13. Right-click on the icon of the USB drive.

  14. Click "Unmount".

  15. The green triangle on the USB drive's icon will go away.

  16. It is now safe to take the USB drive out of its socket.

Question: Why did it say "out of disk space" when copying to the flash drive, even though the size of the files to be copied is less than the free space on the drive?

Answer: Some flash drives are formatted with the FAT12 or FAT16 filesystem. This is inefficient. If there are a lot of small files, the flash drive may fill up much more quickly that you might expect. There are two ways round the problem:

The first way is to archive the files onto the flash drive. To archive means to create one big file instead of lots of small ones. To create an archive, click K menu, Utilities, Ark (Archiving Tool). The second way is to reformat the drive to a more efficient filesystem, such as FAT32.

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