Poor man's install, with extra storage, on NTFS/Win7

[Capricorny]

@ Capricorny

Rather than put all your stuff in with Win7 as 'just another file'
why not at least first segregate the section you use into a Virtual Hard Drive?
That is a built-in capability of Win7 Home Premium that would seem
to offer some protection from lousing up Win7 when using its resources.

I still don't get why you want to do this so terribly complicated!
Please tell me the chance of corrupting the whole Win7 file system by using my method. It's close to nil. We are not deleting, relocating, using metadata, not anything except for creating a few files at one point of time, and doing random access on them, mostly ro, later. If this had been very risky, I think we should have had reports about it.
Using virtual hard drives might well offer some protection, but I simply don't trust Windows concepts before I have seen them thoroughly tested, and the extra level of complexity must be well motivated by some actual problems.

BTW, I wonder if these VHD's are not simply loop-mounting coming to Windows. In which case we would get an extra, unnecessary level of indirection using them. But I may be wrong.

[utu]

I simply don't trust ......concepts before I have seen them thoroughly tested, .....But I may be wrong.

Your idea is attractive, it's new to me, I'd like to see it succeed.
Glad you are willing to use your own Win system to see if it
works out.

I won't risk mine so willingly until I see more folks doing it with
no ill effects. I'm no Windows hater, I like Windows, I just like
linux better.

Lots of luck to you.

[Capricorny]

I won't risk mine so willingly until I see more folks doing it with
no ill effects. I'm no Windows hater, I like Windows, I just like
linux better.

Sure, we all have to choose the level of risk taking, and there IS some risk involved. I would not do this on mission-critical machines, BUT:

1. The correct thing to do is keeping a sharp as possible distinction between program and data re disk use. Now, Windows makes this hard in a completely meaningless way by not letting you shrink NTFS partitions by more than ca 50%. But if you are serious about your system, you have a system partition of a few GB, which is easily restored from backup, plus one (or several) larger data partitions which you backup to external media, typically USB harddisks. Corrupting either of these, you get back by a few simple commands.
Therefore, if using Knoppix poses a great risk for you, that's just an indication of wrong system design. I would in fact say, not really serious. But yes, that's what Windows arranges for.

2. To me, your worry is a bit similar to walking in the fast lane on a highway and being very concerned about being hit by an helicopter. Harddisks start developing failures after some time, inevitably. And with a running laptop, it is not that difficult to inflict damage. It's not for fun that my new Toshiba R830 has a movement sensor and a utility (under Windows) that kicks in and parks the harddisk head whenever movement is detected. Furthermore, NTFS is a somewhat errantly moving target, and guess who has the most problems with that. Yes, of course M$ themselves. A good portion of all disk corruptions seem to stem from software bugs. But the most important, is the malware aspect. Check the percentage of Win computers being infected to some degree.

3. If you do the really relevant comparison here: What kind of use is assocated with the highest risk of corruption per hour of use, I think poor man's Knoppix may turn out the safest way to use your Windows computer. In particular if you run it off the SD card or the smartphone, but also from hard disk. So, when you insist on running Knoppix in a VM, that seems much more of a safety hazard to me, because of Windows, than running it natively. I do it the other way round, and it is much, much simpler. And as I demonstrated, itcan easily be done off a NTFS partition. (Now I have made that store.img file 120 GB.)