So, I’ve never used linux at length, except with a netbook that I was screwing around with at a buddy’s house. As per an earlier thread, I cannot get my tower to recognize any data-DVD ROMS which I have in windows. It’s annoying.
I am told, however, that I can boot Ubuntu off of a disk in order to access my hard drive in the event windows is in catastrophic failure mode and I want my files. Can I use the boot disc to load up Ubuntu, and then proceed to install files on my tower at the same time with it? Linux, according to the tech people who looked at my PC, is able to read the DVDs with no problem. Then, when I go back to Windows, will any windows based software I install be waiting for me when I switch back?
I’m trying to avoid the arduous task of flushing out my computer, re-downloading windows 7 and then re-installing. It’s probably not that arduous, but using Ubuntu to install DVDs just seems infinitely preferable to me than going through the trouble!
If you want to install windows software using Ubuntu (or another flavour of Linux) then you are going to need to use Wine (a Windows compatability layer), which will install the software for use by Ubuntu (but not by your current Windows installation)*.
If all you want to do is copy some files across, then you should be ok. AFAIK current Linux releases can read and write to NTFS now (which used to be a problem). The main issue may be if you only have the one optical drive, because I don’t know if Ubuntu can be run entirely in memory - if you have two drives this won’t be an issue. Otherwise consider running Ubuntu from a live installation on a USB stick (not sure how to do that, but try google) or consider another distro such as Puppy 5 which will readily install to USB.
*if you really need to install software, you could copy the DVD as an ISO image onto the hard drive, and then mount it using MagicDisc (freely available software) for installation in Windows.
I have been using ISOs for the most part, but since the second opitical drive is the USB one that I got for my netbook, it makes no difference wheter I do it via an ISO file or via Linux. But I’m also curious how Linux looks and feels. If I like it, I may partition the hard drive and use it as my default OS.
Yes, but that’s because linux has support for a wide range of filesystems, notably NTFS (in this case). Note that reading/writing data is an altogether different thing than executing/installing a program (written for a different OS).
If I understand what you’re asking…no. You can’t use Ubuntu to install Windows software and then go back to Windows to run it. However, you might be able to use Wine – a Windows emulator – to install/run Windows software from “within” Ubuntu.
I’m not sure if this is helpful, but for the future, you might want to look into installing Windows via USB.
Note that I’m not a Windows guy, have no experience with either Wine or Windows on USB, and do not vouch for information from that link – I only provide it as one example of many that come up when searching for “windows usb”.