One old article may be of some real interest to you aboiut how a live for cd distro has other purposes like data rescue on MS type systems whether Fat or NTFS is the partition type. You can review the "Computer First Aid using Knoppix" article seen at
http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/
A few other live distros can also be used to substitute Knoppix like ubuntu for gaining acccess to partitions when Windows can't for some reason. At the time of the article Knoppix being small in size was the choice for something like that.