the Ubuntu load till where? Did you get any GUI?

You're trying to access the computer's disks through the liveCD? I haven't really tried to do that before, but I don't really think it's possible (correct me if I'm wrong)...

But about not being able to modify the external, that's normal. I take your friend's external HDD is formatted with NTFS (the default Windows disk format). Ubuntu can only read NTFS formatted disk, no writing.

It CAN write to FAT32 formatted disks though...

Obviously, you will not see your access point and the Intel Pro Wireless Card in your Ubuntu because it's a VM. Your Ubuntu is supposed to use the emulated ethernet driver instead.

Yes. You can only use your wifi if you are running Ubuntu physically on your machine. In fact, not just Ubuntu, any OSes running in VM can't directly access the underlying wireless adapter driver running on your host OS and thus, the actual wireless adapter in your PC would not get detected. Any resources needed by the VM is being relayed via the emulated drivers to your host OS and subsequently, the request is being forwarded to the intended target. Either way, it shouldn't be any problem connecting to a network if the emulated driver is loaded. Type in lsmod | grep pcnet in terminal and you should see an output.

Ok. Let me be clear. The guest OS will not know what hardware you are using. Everything is being emulated except the processor and of course the RAM. As an illustration, let's say you have a Nvidia 8800GT graphics card running on your PC. With Windows XP running as a host OS, you would see Nvidia 8800GT listed under device manager, wouldn't you? But, in your guest OS, you would see some other device as your graphics processor. Well, that "other device" is just some emulated device. The same applies to whatever network card you are using. If you have a D-Link wireless adapter, the D-Link wireless adapter would not appear in the guest OS's device listing. Instead, an emulated network interface driver is shown such as the pcnet32 ethernet kernel module. The emulated ethernet driver is there to provide a network interface for the guest OS to communicate with the actual D-Link wireless adapter's device driver loaded on the host OS, in this case Windows XP and everything else is being controlled by VMWare Workstation or any other hypervisor.

So, if you were to use a USB Wifi Adapter, the guest OS would not be able detect it since it is virtual and does not has direct access to the hardware. The only interface available is the emulated pcnet32 driver and it will work out the same as I've describe above for the D-Link wireless adapter.

Basically, there's nothing wrong with your Ubuntu(guest OS) not being able to detect your wireless adapter. As long as the emulated ethernet interface is being associated with a correct local IP address, I don't see a problem with that. Else, you would need to fiddle around with configs.