Just to get a little back to the point......because even though i am prior navy, all those acronyms are just confusing (and besides, I'm new!)

My original question was about whether I could just forgo using a live cd (knoppix) and put the os on the hard drive (and it would be resident with XP) and it being able to work.....question answered:
by grunt (thanks), it's too difficult (especially to a new user), so i am not going to try.
Soooooo...
without a cd burner, and with grunt's answer, i am relegated to waiting til i buy a new ext cd burner or a friend to mail the cds to me, whichever comes first.

now, since i have been reading the AO *nix tutorials all morning, i have a couple new questions.....here goes:

background and q:

With XP humming along and doing all the things that make it great. Say i want to create words docs, excel spreadsheets, ppt presentations, and just all kinds of stuff and saving all this stuff as i go along (obviously to the hard drive). it is saved what i am assuming is to an NTFS file system (and i haven't done a lot of research on file systems). Now I boot from my knoppix live cd and am cruising along and my sys is doing all it's supposed to do and same situation: i want to create docs and spreadsheets and all kinds of data to be saved. where does this data get saved (because if i've read correctly, knoppix and ntfs are not friends). So, if all the above is correct, then am i supposed to partition or petition or go in with a reciprocating saw and cut out some hard drive space for unix or what????

next: the windows registry is something i've been reading up a lot on lately and it is supposed to be the "neuronetwork" of windows containing all this magic and fairy bytes making it work, blah blah blah......does *nix have something like this or is that what makes the FUNDAMENTAL difference between the two OSs and I have just asked a supremely dumb question? thanks....eric