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Win 10 home theater PC file system (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 months ago by RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.world

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.14-rc6/filesystems/ntfs3.html

Note if you are sharing it with windows MS could update or change something that could corrupt the data. Always have backups.

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

I would be running Linux only with Windows completely removed.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Corruption is unlikely, but permissions might be a problem.

How much free space do you have? You might be able to shrink the NTFS and create another (I usually use xfs for data partitions), copy the data, then delete NTFS and expand xfs to full size.

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago

I have around 8 TB free. I have linked what I have in other replies.

[+] Lembot_0004@discuss.online 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Kernal64@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago

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

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

The biggest issue that I ran into when I was using NTFS drives with Linux was caused by unclean drive dismounts. After power outages, forced shutdowns, or manually pulled drives (I am the problem sometimes), the NTFS drive would sometimes fail to mount properly unless I connected it to a Windows computer and scanned the drive for errors first. Not the end of the world if you have backups and a Windows computer handy, but pretty terrible if you don't have both.

[–] RunJun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hmm ya, that’s definitely a concern in my location. Power goes out several times a year here, even if it’s just momentarily long enough to power off the PC. I should have a UPS but never had the spare cash to throw at that.

[–] bismuthbob@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 months ago

To be fair, power loss is a concern for any setup. More recent copy-on-write filesystems are supposed to be a bit more resilient...but I also worry about the lack of a long-term reliability track record for newer filesystems like BTRFS. The long term solution, like more than one other poster has indicated, is having multiple backups.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I would just make sure you're only READING from the NTFS volume. Writing to NTFS is technically supported, but due to the nature of the filesystem, it will run into errors at some point as others may have mentioned.