I thought I’ll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I’ll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

  • snooggums@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    I have windows PC with 6 drives, mostly SSD and on HDD that I assume are all NTFS. Two of the drives are nvme(?) attached to the mobo, and I only have one mobo with nvme slots. I have a number of older boards that top out at SATA connections.

    If I install Linux Mint, can I format one nvme drive with whatever the current preferred linux formatting is, install Mint, and move the files from the other drives around as I format each one?

    Or do I need to move all the data I want to keep to SATA drives, put them in a different windows box, and then copy them over using a network connection?

    It’s been a while and I’m guessing my lack of finding an answer means linux still doesn’t work with NTFS enough to do what I’m thinking of.

    • shadowintheday2@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You can freely manipulate NTFS in Linux. Just make sure your distribution has, after kernel >=5.15, enabled it, otherwise you may need to install the ntfs-eg driver. Other than that, Ach Wiki has info that may help you on any distro:

      https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NTFS

      I have done something similar to what you want to do, just needed the ntfs-3g driver installed and “Disks” (gnome disks) application would mount/read/write the disks as usual

    • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      linux can read and write ntfs, edit partition tables and resize ntfs partitions

      you could (theoretically, do not do this!) free up 8gb of space on your ssd in windows, defragment it then boot a linux installer and use it to shrink the ntfs partition and install ilnux in that 8gb.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I was read/writing on NTFS partitions back in 2004, so your information that Linux doesn’t work with NTFS is at least 20 years old.