Ubuntu – the best way to keep all your files when moving from Windows to Ubuntu

10.10filesystempartitioningwindows

I've been planning to change my OS to Ubuntu,
but my hard disk contains 750GB of files (in two NTFS partitions: 250GB and 700GB).

I know that it is possible to keep the larger partition and install Ubuntu to the remaining space, but I would like to know if it is efficient to read an NTFS partition from within Ubuntu, and whether there are better ways.

Best Answer

it is efficient to read an NTFS partition from within Ubuntu

  • Yes, it more than efficient enough to read your data. It will work relatively well. However, note that NTFS doesn't support all the advanced permissions and journaling that Linux filesystems do, and that Linux requires to work nicely. This means that if you use the partition for anything other than simple data, you may run into issues. Note also that the NTFS implementation is rather new, and not as rock solid as the one for FAT or even HFS.

whether there are better ways

  • You could back up the data to another drive and start from a clean slate. The Ubuntu installer will give you one big partition for all your stuff, and this is the way things work most nicely in Linux.

But as I said, mounting and using the big partition will work perfectly. If you choose not to create a real Linux file system.

You can't convert them easily and safely. If you want to change a file system, you should back up the data anyway. And if you do, creating a new partition and restoring the data to it makes a lot more sense. I'm relatively sure there isn't a stable implementation of NTFS to ext4 conversion. File systems are awesomely complicated. :-)

If you have only the one hard drive, and no possibility of backing it all up, I'd recommend to touch it as little as possible. Don't shrink partitions, let alone try to convert file system. Install Ubuntu on the 250GB partition,

you'll be very happy.

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