I work away from home for weeks at a time, and I hurriedly set up my server on my last day at home last month
I got a free PC, and a 10tb HDD. Lenovo uses a stupid special cable to run sata drives off the motherboard, I didn’t know there were two sizes, bought the wrong size and said fuck it so I installed windows on the same drive and same partition I now have 4 tb worth of media
Now I want to move to Linux as my server OS, I got another PC that actually has the ability to run multiple HDDs
Can I access the files on this drive from another OS? Is there a way to keep these files without transferring it all to another HDD?
Yeah sure, you can mount an (unencrypted) windows drive in Linux, view the files etc. Linux can support the NTFS filesystem it uses. You can generally even do so from a USB flashdrive install of Linux
Can I utilize this system for jellyfin (the most experience I have with Linux is KDE Plasma in SteamOS)?
Can I remove windows and keep the files?
You can resize partitions in Windows so one way to do it would be to shrink the NTFS partition with the media files from the Windows disk manager, then use the free space in Linux for an ext4 partition, copy the media files, then use GParted in Linux to remove the NTFS position then move and resize the Linux partition.
Of course this is quite convoluted so the safest would be to copy the files to another disk while you wipe the other one and format in Linux, then copy back.
Spot on advice. I’d observe that media files tend to be quite large, and if all that the disk has been used for has been copying these files onto it, then they’re likely to be both relatively defragmented and at the start of the disk, so the reduction in partition size isn’t going to be as slow as it usually is. (Which is very slow.)
Since media files are relatively infrequently read, I’d probably want to use a filesystem that checks against bit rot instead of ext4 - make sure that they’ve not become corrupt when you want to use them. But that’s Linux holy war territory, so I’ll leave it alone.
I would recommend to use a fast SSD for the System and mount a extra disk for Media. Additionally, I would invest in multiple HDD, since with a good RAID setup, you can speed up the reading and writing of files (simultaneously read and write on multiple drives) and if one of your drives dies (which server drives will after some years) you can replace one or even two (depending on RAID setup) HDDs without loosing data (there will be time needed to restore the files, depending on your RAID setup)
You can most likely simply mount the old drive and access the files that way. Just make sure that your boot configuration is set so it doesn’t try to boot the windows disk.
And know that linux file permissions don’t work on NTFS, which windows uses
Yes if you have a big HDD for speed try to get bcachefs as Filesystem. It is somewhat complex but if you install a small 250GB or so SSD you could speed up your read/write time a lot.
Not sure what you mean with those partitions, do you have a 6TB windows partition?? Then just delete that. And 4TB of also NTFS files?
I dont know if you can convert filesystems while leaving the files there, interesting question. But probably not
No, I’m saying I have a windows install that I then used to download 4tb worth of files, my original goal was to mount a second drive to use as the file source, but I’ve had issues in the past trying to access files from a hard drive with a windows install on it
So, you have 6TB empty space?
You should put in a usb flash drive, create some good partition on that 6TB and copy the files from the windows partition over there. Then delete the NTFS partition and increase the bcachefs partition.
But warning, I have not used bcachefs. Just dont use ext4, prefer btrfs maybe
Ah okay thank you
So yeah use any liveUSB for example Fedora KDE and create the bcachefs partition and copy the files. Good luck!
You can mount NTFS from Linux. You do not need anything from Linux to do it.
In theory, you could continue using NTFS. I would not. Get those files off to somewhere else and reformat with something Linux native.
