Linux off CD or USB

In order to allow a user to have access to a physical drive/partition within linux, you need to 'mount' it. There are a number of issues to be concerned with:
- the name of the partition (often like hda1 or hda5),
- the location in the filesystem it needs to mounted to (a directory in the tree structure that has no other contents. You have to have permissions to access that directory too.),
- the encoding used to format the partition (NTFS, FAT, FAT32). There are additional issues around NTFS partitions,
- whether the partition is to R/O or R/W from linux,
- if you as a user have permissions to mount anything.

There is too much to answer here. I'd suggest looking at the online MANual for this command. Take a look at:

http://www.ss64.com/bash/mount.html

Good luck!

As much as I like linux, I have to admit a lot depends of how fast your machine is and the amount of memory. Also, any liveCD will be slower than an install (and even be impacted by the speed of the drive). The same is true of running in any emulator, like QEMU, or even as a virtual machine using VMPlayer, Virtual Iron, or Virtual Box.

And Linux will look and act different, based on which Window Manager (e.g., KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE) is being used by the particular distribution. So, don't let your experience with one distro color your view of the Linux world. Not everybody likes the same thing!

Okay, down to the details;
Try DSL on CD first. It uses the least resources of the major liveCD's and because it uses the 2.24 series kernel, it will run on older equipment. It is only 50 meg and if you need to download and burn a copy, it will be the fastest to do that! PLEASE REMEMBER TO FOLLOW YOUR BURNING SOFTWARE DIRECTIONS FOR ISO IMAGES. ISO's and other drive images are burned differently than other types of files.

There are others worth trying; my particular favorite is called PCLinuxOS and uses KDE as it's Window Manager. It is in the middle of some website problems (caused by growing popularity), repository upheaval (crashes at Ibiblio, won't affect a liveCD user, just those installed), and in the middle of a series of Test Releases for the 2007 edition. If you can find a copy of PCLOS 0.93a 'Big Daddy', it would be worth a try.

Be aware that ALL liveCD's have some difficulties with some wireless chipsets, so don't expect a liveCD will work with yours - an Ethernet cable goes a long way.

Gosh, this is a lot longer than I realized! I'll cut off here.