Quote Originally Posted by utu View Post
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.
There is certainly some confusion here.

case 1:
When Knoppix poor-man install is made to a NTFS file system, and when Knoppix is booted, it is accessing the NTFS via fuse/ntfs-3g. The risk is about fuse/ntfs-3g.

If you created a VHD on NTFS using Win7 capability, now assuming Knoppix is somehow about to boot, what is the driver you are going to use to access the (Win7) VHD on NTFS on ***LINUX*** ? Assuming that you could find such a driver, that will have to be a Linux driver. Certainly the risk of higher than using fuse/ntfs-3g !!!

case 2:
Then assuming that you are not running Knoppix natively, ie you are running Knoppix in Virtual Machine under Win7, then when Knoppix accessing it's harddisk, it goes through Linux file system drivers in the guess OS then it passes on to drivers on the virtual machine on the Host OS. The virtual machine may access it via it's proprietary driver ( eg Virtualbox .vdi ) or if you are lucky, it might understand Win7 virtual HD format. Whatever it is, assuming Linux file system driver is safe to use ext3/cloop/etc, then the risk is entirely on the virtual machine. Now it is matter of you want to trust the proprietary file system driver of the virtual machine, or you want it to trust the virtual machine able to also understand win7 VHD.

Whatever is the configuration, I would say in conclusion by having Win7 VHD, you are adding complexity and RISKs, especially case 1 above.