There is plenty of software which allows Linux to work with NTFS file system. For windows there is not as much. But I think Acronis "Backup and Recovery" allows you to read Linux file systems under windows.
boot partitionThe boot partition is the disk partition that contains the Windows operating system files and its support files, but not any files responsible for booting.
do your own research
root partition
(On Windows), the active partition is a primary partition on a disk which Windows will load its files from. An active partition is always a startup partition. If there are several OS's on the one disk, Windows will load from the one marked as active. - pentavore
Have a look at WUBI (search Google) to install Ubuntu as a file, without making any changes to your Windows 8 hard-drive. To remove WUBI, simply use Windows utility to uninstall programs. Or, create a separate partition on the Windows hard-drive and install Linux (or which ever distro you wish to use) on to the new partition. Remember to first backup important files onto an external storage device. Or, download and burn a Linux distribution with an ISO extension onto a CD and use as a Live Disk. If you then intend to install Linux, you will be given the choice to either install as a dual-boot with Windows by installing Linux alongside Windows, or wiping Windows and letting Linux use all the hard-drive.
Active partition is a term Windows uses to mean the partition Windows will boot off of. The Windows boot loader goes to its configuration file and starts, these files will be in the active partition.
There are two ways of doing this:Use a virtualization program such as VirtualBox to install run Linux and Windows side by side at the same time.Partition your hard drive and install Linux to an empty partition to set up a dual boot partition. Be careful with this option; you can damage your files if you make a mistake, but you'd get much better performance than if you took option one. See the related links for a good guide on how to do this.
More or less.
boot partition
Boot Partition
MS is nasty and try very hard to make things incompatible, but generally linux can read and write windows drive.
In Linux: ls In Windows: dir