Converting from Windows XP over to Ubuntu Hesitant to reformat.
UbuntuThis forum is for the discussion of Ubuntu Linux.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
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.
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.
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.
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.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.