You can install as a dual boot with Windows. You'll need to edit partitions when the installer comes to that stage - this is assuming you have enough room on the hard drive(s). You don't need much space for EMC.
EMC/Ubuntu can't be run within Windows as a virtual machine as you won't be running in realtime which the real time kernel needs. You can do a virtual machine installation for a regular *nix install, but with GRUB it's just as easy to do dual-boot. You can choose which OS to boot into at startup.
You should be able to see the Windows hard drive if you mount it, but I'm not versed enough in *nix to walk you through that.
LiveCD running - not sure. The drawbacks would be you'd have to manually mount the hard drive each time to be able to get at the machine configuration.
Best idea IMHO is to just do a dual-boot install and then you can have both worlds - Ubuntu/EMC and Windows.
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