I have tried Knoppix and it mounted all my computer's partitions and displayed them on the desktop - I thought this was wonderful.

Then I tried Ubuntu, it allowed me to see all the rest of the computers on the network - I thought this was wonderful.

But where are all my own partitions? Am I locked out because I do not have the right permissions? Who determines who can see Windows partitions? Knoppix allowed you to hack in anywhere - a great recovery tool.

Have I missed something obvious?

for someone not used to linux, you didnt miss anything obvious per say...but its just that some distros will autimaticly mount all partitions, and some wont.... manually mounting them is a snap though....you can also configure the system to automaticly mount them at boot. to manually mount them type:

mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda

this will mount the second partition on the first hard drive to /mnt/hda (fat32 filesystem) of course you can change the type, the partition and the mountpoint. to automaticlly have this happen at boot type somthing like this to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda2 /windows vfat umask=000 0 0

again just change the partition mountpoint and filesystem type to match your system

have your tried mounting them manually?? if you did an install you just need to add the right entries to /etc/fstab one time and then you won't need to worry about it anymore...

EDIT: fatrandy13 beat me to it...

Read through your /etc/fstab file. It is possible that the windows partitions are mounted but that a normal user doesn't have permission to access them. This policy may differ from distro to distro, and may change depending on the security level you use. There may also be a group designated to allow users to read the windows partitions.

This howto ( http://ubuntuguide.org/#automountntfs ) indicates that windows partitions are set up to mount at boot by default. This unofficial guide has an index with entries starting with "how to ..." so you might with to save the link for quick reference.