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
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.