Ubuntu – How to convert a drive from ext4 to NTFS without losing the data

hard drivepartitioningwindows

I have a hard drive from an Ubuntu system that contains only media files. I would like to move that drive to a Windows 10 computer without losing all of the media. Is this possible, and if so, how can it be done?

I don't want to just mount the ext4 drive in Windows. I want to convert the drive from ext4 to NTFS.

Best Answer

If you have sufficient unused space on the drive, create a second partition, format it to NTFS, and copy the files to the NTFS partition. You could then delete the original files and the ext4 partition, and append the space to the NTFS partition, essentially converting the entire drive from ext4 to NTFS.

If there isn't sufficient available space on the drive to do this, you could copy the files to another computer/drive, format the original drive as NTFS, and copy the files back to the newly formatted drive.

Related Solutions

Create Partition Without Formatting Drive

You can use Gparted (available in the Ubuntu Software Centre) to resize the 2TB down in 200GB and format those 200GB as FAT.

That process does not require you to format the previous NTFS partition, but its always a risk. There is no 100% safe process for that and a backup of your data is always the most responsible thing to do.

Instructions on how to install and use Gparted are here: How to resize partitions?

Just open the program, locate your hard disk, right click on the partition and select resize/move, give it some room on the right up to the amount you need and create a new partition on the new free space. After you applied the changes you will have 2 partitions on your disk: the old one containing your data, and a new formatted 200GB FAT32 partition.

Convert FAT32 to NTFS – How to Convert FAT32 Partition to NTFS Without Data Loss

As Rinzwind stated,

it is not possible unless you use Windows.

Now that being said, even if you have windows, you have to be careful when doing it.

You have to move the drive to another machine in order to be able to accomplish that, since you can't convert a live volume.

The command to use to do the conversion is:

convert <drive_letter>: /FS:NTFS

Note: Always keep in mind that when dealing with anything to do with partitions, make sure that you have a current backup, in case something goes wrong.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Create Partition Without Formatting Drive

Convert FAT32 to NTFS – How to Convert FAT32 Partition to NTFS Without Data Loss

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