Is it ok to swap over to Linux as long as the boot drive is reformatted as Ext4 but my storage drives are NTFS?
I have a Win 10 home theater pc that I use for plex and gaming. I want to swap over to Linux but my drives are formatted in NTFS. I have heard that while Linux can read and write NTFS, there is a possibility of corruption. I have a separate OS drive that I can reformat.
I really don’t have the spare cash right now to buy another HDD to pull over files before reformatting my current drives.
This is what my searching has panned out to be. If I completely removed Windows from my system and do not run any programs from the NTFS drives, does my risk go down?
Issue is that I have around 30 TB of data and so getting a drive to shuffle data while reformatting instantly puts me in the $250+ range which isn’t really possible right now.
Are the data drives completely full? If not, you could potentially shrink the partition using something like GParted, then create a new ext4 or whatever file system you want with the newly unallocated space. Then, move some data from the ntfs partition to the new ext4 partition. Once the new partition is full, shrink the ntfs one, expand the ext4 one, and copy over more data. It’ll probably be tedious, but it should be doable and save you from having to buy a new drive.
They’re not, and I can get one drive for sure formatted with transferring. I do get concerned with large scale transferring and worrying that the drive will die lol
Well, if those are just videos or other such data then you’re almost perfectly safe. Almost.
If you describe what and how many disks you have, maybe we would be able to figure out some cheap walkaround?
Essentially I have two primary storage drives of 8 and 18 TB. The other storage drives are my old drives that I’m not worried about.
I see, I hoped you have just a bunch of smaller disks.
Do you have another Win-machine where you can mount those disks if in need of maintenance (this need might never actually happen!)? If yes, then just move to Linux and everything will be ok.
I have another pc that I could do that but I was looking at bringing it over to Linux too. I guess I could have that stay on Windows until I obtain another drive.