Hard drive

Well I downloaded the .iso file and ran it in VMWare. It worked alright, but was pretty sluggish. I have a question: when you start Jnode from the CD on a real machine does it use the hard drive for anything?
More importantly, will it leave any files or do anything to my files all ready on it? (I have Windows XP installed.)
Thanks,
verny

JNode will not write

JNode will not write anything by it self on your hard disk, if this is what you fear, but depending on your filesystem, you might not be able to write on the disk yourself. The status of NTFS filesystem parts are read-only, but if one of your partitions are FAT32 you write to it.