So I’ve been putting this off all summer, but with support nearly ending for Win 10 and finally having a weekend to spend on this, and absolutely refusing to move to win 11, I’m finally pulling the trigger and getting this done.
I run a home built AMD rig with a 5800x and RT 7800xt, so as I understand, drivers shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve got 3 storage drives currently, a 1tb m.2 NVME I use for the OS and games I need to run quicker, and 2 SATA SSDs. I’ve also got a much larger external HDD which I’ll use to back up my entire windows environment (which I’ll disconnect after it’s backed up) just in case things go sideways during this process.
My biggest concern is here is moving all of my music, pictures, and docs over after the migration. Is it as simple as copying everything over from the NTFS win10 backup HDD to my newly formatted ext4 drives outside of the OS partition? I’m sure I’m not completely phrasing this correctly, since my understanding of Linux is currently at about a 4th grade level, and is probably why I’ve been running around in circles trying to find answers without much luck. I did go over the Mint install docs, but it seems a little light on details for my particular concern.
If there are any resources, suggestions or advice anyone could offer here to help me get through this, I gladly thank you in advance.
Documents and media is your smallest problem. As you put it, you simply copy them over and that’s it.
Perfect, thank you!
I see you already got the answers you need, so I just came to welcome you to the linux community, and wish you good luck.
In the beginning, it will be a bit hard, because changing things we’re used to is always hard, but give it some time, and you get the long-term benefits, which, in my opinion, are very worth it. Among a few things, you will experience no arbitrary interruptions to your device usage, will have lower hardware requirements, your devices will last longer, will have to deal with much less bullshit, and will even have more free time (unless you become one who likes to spend time tinkering with the system lol)
Thanks! It’s not even a hardware issue for me, I pretty much overbuilt this rig. It’s way more than capable of running 11. For me, it’s more of a “I’m done with MS’ BS” at this point.
Um, let’s just clarify a bit more just in case.
You have your pictures, music, videos, and other personal files on what?
On the internal hard drives (hdd/ssd/nvme/whatever) and the backup/copy of those files on the external drive (external usb hdd/ssd, flash drive, NAS, whatever)? Presumably both are formatted ntfs?
What I described above is the ideal scenario. It could be as simple as formatting your internal drives and installing Linux, then copying those files back to your newly formatted internal hard drives. This is going to be fine as long as you are SURE your backups are good. Linux can read ntfs drives and copy files from them.
I’m always a bit paranoid though and I like to take extra steps. Sometimes, you forget to backup a file. Like a save game file sitting in a random game folder, a configuration file (like a blahblah.ini) files for program settings, or your favorites, you get the point. This stuff usually isn’t a deal breaker - you really only care about the stuff that’s irreplaceable like pictures and home movies. But it’s annoying…
So what I like to do is to take a drive image. Not a backup - a bit for bit clone of the internal hard drives. Then you can’t forget anything ;) Pick your program of choice - I’ve used macrium reflect successfully in the past and it was free - it’s been a while and there may be better options these days. Make that image and store it on a large external drive/nas/whatever. Then if you screw something up - you can simply restore your windows computer or go grab that file you forgot in your backup routine. I usually keep both my “backup files” and the drive image for a good long while after I reload a pc. Sometimes it’s months before you realize you’re missing something.
So in summary/my advice.
- Get a big external drive
- Make a disc image of your internal drives onto that large external drive
- Make a solid final backup of your files double checking you’ve copied everything you think you need
- Disconnect that external drive and put it aside
- format your pc and internal drives as part of your Linux installation
- plug your external drive into your Linux pc, mount the ntfs drive, copy all your files
- Put the external drive away in a closet and don’t overwrite it for a good long time
- if you screwed something up - no big deal, you can go backwards in time because you have that external drive stored safely away.
I would certainly rather take extra steps to ensure I don’t lose something I need later. Thanks for the reply, I’ll end up doing this.
I should note that depending on which internal drives are used - you can use them like external drives for backups. You can copy files and images there, then easily disconnect the sata cable. Then you can’t overwrite it by accident during install. But you get to use the large size of the drive for images and whatnot.
It sounds like you have enough drives to do this super safely with zero chance of screwing things up :)
Welcome to the club. I switched about a year ago and its been fine.
Mind you, I was a windows power user and I Linux I’m just a below average minimalist user, but its been fine. Also mind you, I run a windows VM for some stuff I’m still tethered to (virt-manager is your friend if this is the case). But I have 3 machines in my house that are all Mint boxes and its smooth sailing.
There are some things I wish were different, but you need to choose your battles. Like I don’t want any kernel based anticheat on my system so those kinds of games I play on console if available, or don’t play at all.
As far as advice, part of what I like about Mint is their forum. Yes, you can always search and find answers but with so many variances between distros having a forum tailored to your specific OS is a nice perk. You will find a lot of answers there.
Hot tip: read up on file permissions, users and groups. Permissions aren’t inherited like they are in windows so that’s a mental adjustment you need to make.
You’ll probably pick up on the file structure fairly quickly. Though I didn’t unhide the hidden folders in my home directory because I needed to (I forger why but it came up)
And honestly, I’ve used an AI tool to help walk me through getting some stuff to work (somehow I broke my Samba sharing) so that’s always a resource to help guide you and troubleshoot.
You can leave these as NTFS, but you never know if the linux ntfs driver might do something wrong during a write operation (during reading is usually safe, but in writing operations there could be problems).
I’ll reformat the drives to the suggested ext4, that part’s fine. I was worried about whether or not I’d have to somehow convert all of the files going from the NTFS windows backup to the ext4 drives, but the other comment here said just copying them over would work.
Thank you for the reply!
As someone similarly unfamiliar with Linux I’ll say I just made the move as well a few weeks ago and haven’t had any issues so far! Ive even started playing with wine and lutris to get games working, with a little tweaking I was even able to drag the files of an already installed game from Windows over to Linux and then get lutris to run it. I was pretty surprised to see it worked lol
@BurningRiver just copy it into your home folder. If you make an own partition for home it is unaffected by reinstalling the os if necessary.
