Hey, Counterzone, if you have an issue with the HDD being possibly written to, just unplug your HDD power cables (easy way) or the ribbon cables that connect them either at the HDD or the Mobo... Personally, as long as you don't activly go through and try to change files you will be fine.

As far as NTFS, the project that my buddy was working on has all but died, since people have found a more stable way of implementing it, albeit much slower, and Klaus had said that he was planning on adding support for this method on 3.4, at release more than likely. How this method works is it emulates all that the NTFS 'driver' needs and then lets it do all of the work like it was in windows, so essentially it is emulation, but it is not a real emulator, since it is more like wine.