To your second question, Waba, you can indeed run this script on a copy of the files from your reader. There is no reason it needs to be a "live" copy on the reader connected via USB. In fact, I do this everytime as a extra line of backup in case something goes wrong with the script (which it never has).
Besides a full virtual machine, you might take a look at cygwin which provides a full linux terminal with out all the extra overhead of an OS. It runs pretty slick for me whenever I find myself unfortunately on Windows.
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