I've just built a new PC and installed Bazzite Linux. Although I'm a bit of a newbie with Linux, I'm pretty comfortable with Windows. My setup includes a 1TB M.2 drive, along with three additional drives: one SATA SSD, one SATA HDD, and an external USB SATA HDD. All my extra drives are formatted in NTFS, but I know I should convert them to Btrfs for better performance later. Before that, I need to move some data around. However, I'm running into trouble trying to copy files to the external HDD; it won't let me create folders or copy anything over. When I check the disk utility, the option to take ownership is greyed out. I've spent about two hours Googling for solutions but haven't found anything helpful. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! If there's more info you need from me, just let me know!
5 Answers
You’re right that NTFS files don’t directly work with Btrfs. You’ll need to sort out the NTFS issues first before converting or doing any other operations.
Just a word of caution about switching to Btrfs. It's great, but if you accidentally mess up the partitioning, you could lose access to everything on that disk and might need to use recovery tools like photorec to get your files back. Also, check if your external HDD has any bad sectors. You can try running `ntfsfix` or, if you can, check it with Windows' CHKDSK.
It sounds like your NTFS drives might have file system issues. Linux sometimes mounts those drives as read-only if it detects problems. You might want to try using the `ntfsfix` command to fix minor issues, but if the problems are deeper, you might need to boot into Windows and run the CHKDSK tool to repair the drives properly. Just a heads up, you can't really 'take ownership' of NTFS drives using the Disk Utility—that function only works with Linux-native file systems.
If those NTFS drives were used with Windows, there's a chance they’re locked in read-only mode because of Windows' Fast Startup feature. The best way to deal with this is to either boot into Windows and disable Fast Startup or plug the drives into a Windows machine to do that and do a full shutdown.
This sounds less like a Linux problem and more like an issue stemming from Windows. My recommendation is to disable Fast Startup in Windows and run a disk check on your drives before heading back to Linux.
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