Ok i created a mandriva live cd.This may be a dumb question but is everything saving to my hard drive and if so will this overright my windows files? If someone could explain how this is working in simplest form i would appreciate it thanks.

Live CD's normally do not save data to your system. You can or could write to but you'd have to do that with a mouse click or type in some command.

Live CD's are generally the safest way to use linux. They are not totally safe.

The way linux could write to a hard drive would be if you "mount" or otherwise view contents of your hard drive.

If you right click on your windows icon on the desktop you might see words like open or mount or even enable read/write to that effect. If you see those you are safe. If you see unmount then it could be possible that you could damage or delete info on the windows hard drive.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

live cds are TOTALLY SAFE!!!

your ram is only being used..

linuxant

I disagree.

One can easily format, repartiton, delete any hard drive with a live linux cd. Almost all new cd's have ntfs read write now.

Command line and some shutdown parameters could save data to the drive.

Any number of driver issues could cause disaster.

Any number of firmware oddities could cause disaster.

You can screw up your system.

You can not normally go into bios even and say no hard drive. Most OS's don't use it anymore.

To be totally safe remove power from the hard drive.

If you run a live cd under root or admin a malicious attacker could do almost anything to your system. Even with live cd's.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10