need help completing this

Hi everyone.

Recently in my tinkering adventures I decided to see if I could come up with outside the box security measures for my computer. What I want to do is get linux to boot from usb (done), disable boot from HDD (done), and still be able to read and save to my HDD (not done).

the last part is what i need help with. the OS i have installed on my HDD is windows xp. i understand i wont be able to access any of the windows-native files but i would still like to get at my pdfs, pictures, and music.

will a linux OS be able to get to the files saved with windows or will i need a program to read from it? also does the distro matter? if i can get away using puppy or DSL i can use my smaller USB stick.

Yes, Linux can read Windows partitions. You just need to have the right filesystem module loaded in the kernel (for modern Windows systems, that would be ntfs).

To read particular data formats, you just need a program that can handle that format. For example, pdfs can be read with evince or acroread, Word files with abiword or oowrite, and graphical files with any graphical program.

would the format i have on my usb stick affect any of this? the usb is formatted with fat32 if im not mistaken. im assuming the module on the kernel will be independent of this but will it be able to both read the windows ntfs partition and be able to get its OS info from the FAT usb stick?

Yeh what you need to do is.. after you have booted into linux you need to mount the windows partition, then you can easily access and modify any files on your windows partition. If you are running windows on a ntfs partition take a look at this NTFS-3G: Stable Read/Write NTFS Driver. Their should be a package available for your distro, along with ntfs-3g you also need to see if you have FUSE installed. Then simply follow the instructions towards the bottom of the ntfs-3g site.. and you can access your windows partition from linux :)

thank you both