I'm planning to switch from Windows 10 to Linux Mint Cinnamon soon. I already have my flash drive ready with the OS, and I want to move my important documents to my second internal hard drive for safety. I'm even considering cloning my primary C drive to the secondary hard drive just in case I need to restore it later. All my drives are currently formatted with NTFS. Should I reformat them to a different file system, or is that not necessary? Also, what about my third hard drive that I use for games? Should I format that as well, and if so, what file system would be best?
3 Answers
Definitely go for a Linux native file system for your drives. I'd recommend using ext4, as it's very reliable and widely used. If you need to format them, you can do that during the installation process of Linux Mint, or use tools like GParted after you've installed it.
Once everything's set up, it’s best to clear out the Windows partitions unless you absolutely need them. Make sure all your important files are backed up, maybe even to a NAS or cloud storage for extra security.
I was thinking about splitting my second hard drive to clone my C drive onto it just in case I need to switch back to Windows.
EXT4 or BTRFS are solid choices for Linux partitions. While NTFS works temporarily for your data, it's better to switch to a native format because Linux's NTFS support isn't perfect. Just keep in mind, you'll need to convert your games drive too, since executables won't run off an NTFS drive. There is a Windows driver for BTRFS, so if you dual-boot, you won't lose access to your data after switching.
Awesome, thanks! Is there a specific tool you'd recommend for formatting to EXT4? I couldn't find anything useful in the Windows utility.
Thanks! Do you know what software I could use to format to ext4? The Windows disk management tool only shows NTFS, exFAT, and FAT32 options.