Windows NTFS to Linux Partition?

is it possible to convert my sata and ide drives to linux and keep all the data as their BIG drives 320gb each and i dont want to loose all my photography and video manipulations...
either a program in linux or windows would be perfect either way. surely its possible as you can convert fat32 to ntfs without formatting?

 

You can't change NTFS back to anything else. Best thing you can do is use them as read only.

 

With Powerquest Partition Magic you CAN change NTFS to FAT. Maybe there is a Linux tool that makes it possible to change fat to ext (or any other Linux fs), but I don't know one... Google will probably help you out on that.

Note, FAT is perfectly read and writeable by Linux, so a FAT partition would probably fit your needs (except for the limitations in the FAT filesystem maybe?)

I want to note tough, EVERY change in partitioning / filesystems is dangerous, and could cause data corruption. So make sure you have a backup. It's entirely at your own risk.

 

yeah thinking about it i dont REALLY want to convert them to linux dedicated partitions i would prefer to have them in a stable windows format that is read/writeable in linux unlike the dangers of ntfs writes... if i convert them to fat then will it be smooth read/writes cause then i can still use them in windows nicely and what are the limits of a fat partition? i have some large files 4gb etc...

 

IIRC max filesize is 2GBish... But google the FAT32 specifications... That will tell you what you want to know...

 

hmm thats what i thought... guess im gonna have to extract my isos i store for linux distro's and backups of current software etc then atleast i can make a new iso if i need to burn them... is there no way to extend it?

 

FAT32 has a file limit of 4GB and a parition limit of 2TB, so long as one can get around the 4GB limit on files then it's fine really. As Glider said though, it's pretty risky to do this.

 

risky in the conversion of ntfs-fat32 or risky in the process of writing to fat32 under linux?

 

Risky in the process of taking a disk full of data on one file system and converting it into another file system. That's just a risky thing to do.

 

is it risky in the process of writing to fat32 under linux though?

 

Shouldn't be. Nix can write to FAT32 fine IIRC.

 

ok cheers.hmmm possibilities linux is preferred but i want to run games and i have ATi and you get something crap like 37% slower in say ut2004 under linux with a ATi card than with nvidia... hmmm.