Switching OS

[Creeping Death]

I've been contemplating moving over from windows to linux for a while now. I did a bit of research and decided to get my hands on SUSE 10.1. Got the ISOs all lined up and ready to go. Thing is, I just want to try it out to begin with, try to get used to it. I also preferably want to keep all my data... and I'd rather not have to go down the store and buy some cd-rws(haha is it possible to just mount the images?)

Any help is much appreciated

[ilw]

if you want to just try linux, i'd suggest you download a version that has a live cd (e.g. ubuntu 7) that way you don't have to install anything.
As to keeping data, if your hard drive is set up to use the ntfs file system then you'll have a bit of difficulty as linux doesn't really support it. (NTFS is Microsoft &IBMs? proprietary file system and its a bit complicated). If the drive is fat32 formatted then you could just play around with a disk partitioning tool like partition magic to free up some space which can be set aside for linux. Linux uses different file systems to windows so the space you've freed up will be formatted in the way linux likes and then once linux is installed you will still be able to access the data stored on the remaining fat32 part of your hard drive. I'm sure if you search this forum/google you can find more instructions about repartitioning and keeping data

[4play]

linux does have read and write support to ntfs
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ works like a charm for me and never had any data corruption.