Converting from Windows XP over to Ubuntu Hesitant to reformat.
 

Hi, I've recently discovered Ubuntu as a great operating system and I've been planning on converting from windows XP over to Ubuntu. I'm still going to keep a windows partition so I can go back if any issues come up, but the partition contains ALL of my current data and is in NTFS format. Partition magic won't convert it to FAT32 because it's too large for it, My question is, can I run Wine and still access the NTFS directories or will I have to reinstall my applications and move my files over to the FAT32 partition.

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

-Kenny

Hi and welcome to LQ.

You do not have to convert your Windows partition to FAT32. Most modern Linux distributions can read and write to NTFS partitions.

Thanks, pretty new to linux but I'm learning a lot online. I thought that linux was only able to run on FAT file systems.

Linux can read and write to NTFS, FAT, FAT32 and other non Linux filesystems, but in terms of actually running Linux, you need to install it on a native Linux filesystem e.g. ext3. When it comes to installing Linux alongside Windows, most distributions will help you resize your Windows partitions to make space for Linux, format the free space into a Linux filesystem and then enable you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time. So remember that you actually won't be installing Linux on an FAT or NTFS partition.

As the other user above said, linux can deal with fat and ntfs without a problem. Search around for ntfs-3g, which will give you painless write support as well for ntfs.

But it can't run on ntfs partitions. You can mount them, read from them, write to them, but linux can't be installed nor used on ntfs. Tipical file systems for linux are ext2/3 (the native one), xfs, jfs and reiserfs/reiser4.

Alright, I've got Ubuntu installing right now, I'm guessing it made a partition on my E drive for itself. Thanks for the help everyone!

Finished the install while I was typing this up, Gonna restart now and boot up into Ubuntu.

Off topic question, Are there any decent free/open source email/DNS servers around?

Its probably best to ask in a new thread in the Linux Server forum.