my friend said he wants to try out linux. all he wants is for someone to put it on his computer (i got that) but i was always under the impression that all the music, videos, pictures, etc. on your windows partition cannot be accessed when logged into linux. am i completely wrong? or am i right and in order to access his windows files he'll have to copy them onto some kind of external memory storage and just load it onto the linux partition manually?

You're completely wrong. Linux can read and write to ntfs partitions easily. You just mount the partition with the files you want and access them directly. No problem. You can mount the partitions from the file manager, or edit the /etc/fstab file to do it automatically at boot.

His files absolutely can be accessed from linux. And if you are making a dual boot installation, simply set the mount point of your existing Windows partition to something like '/media/windows' -- and the Windows install will automatically mount every time the computer is started up, so you can access its files without any hassle.

Furthermore, once Linux is installed you can make 'symbolic links' to your windows folders and put them in your home folder or your desktop.

I'll show you the steps I take to make symbolic links.

1) I open my file browser and navigate to /media/windows/Users/(my windows user name)
2) I click on the folder I want to symbolically link (ie: Music)
3) And then while holding ALT, I drag-drop the folder into my Home folder
4) A pop up menu will appear and I select 'create symbolic link here'

From now on, I can navigate to the symbolically linked folder which will behave as if it was actually a folder on my system, even though the files are physically stored on the Windows drive.

Depending on what file manager you use, that will usually move or copy the file, not let you choose.