dual OS question

[bigvoo]

Im now thinking about using ubuntu on my new laptop with vista. I only use vista for video editing, and i'd like to keep it offline for ever. and only use linux to go online. question is: if someone got past the linux firewall, can they access vista ( on the other partition ) ? I'm sure it's a dumb question to most people on these forums, but im really curious. thanks

[devils casper]

You can access Vista Partitions or any other partition for data sharing from Linux easily but if you want to Work on Vista OS from Linux you have to install Virtual Machine or Quemu.

[bigvoo]

thanks DC, dang. this pops my bubble a bit. ...I was hoping the answer would be: No! can't access windows while linux is the running os. lol. so much for that. I'm super security paranoid. i had 4 years with no problems at all, but in the last month, 2 of my computers have been hit with trojans and my wireless gateway broked into... I guess that's just life on the internet.

[devils casper]

Data sharing between OSes is a common thing. I am multibooting 5 Linux OSes and Windows XP in my test machine. I have a shared partition which I access from all OSes including Windows XP.

As I mentioned earlier, Its easy to run Windows OSes while running Linux OS. You have to install Virtual Machine or Quemu only.
Check this ScreenShot posted by Bigtomrodney. He is running OpenSuSe as host and Ubuntu inside Quemu.

[bigvoo]

ok I'm learning a bit at a time. I went view system in xp, and called it " disk mgnt" and when i went into xbuntu, there is was on the desktop "disk mgnt". so I'm starting to understand it all. thanks again.

[Thrillhouse]

I wouldn't worry too much about an attack accessing your Windows partition. I would think the only way that would happen is if someone deliberately targeted your machine. However, if you want to be super secure you can close all the open ports on your firewall. You can run:

nmap localhost

to see which ports are open and:

netstat -tulp

to see which services are listening on those ports. If you are unsure about why a port is open and would like to close it, look at the man pages for iptables.