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[–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You can always have a partition for your data separate from your boot partition. Then you just mount that on any distro you run and you're good to go. I have a drive from when I used Windows for media, and I've never reformatted it. Your distro doesn't care where data came from, as long as it can read it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (2 children)

    If you're still using a data drive formatted as NTFS, and you're not using Windows anymore, it's best to change the filesystem.

    Linux NTFS drivers are pretty good, but it's still reverse engineering a proprietary filesystem. Sometimes it misbehaves.

    If you're using something like ExFAT then ignore me.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I need to switch it at some point, but it's a 4TB HDD, and my other drives are smaller. I need to delete a bunch of stuff to be able to reformat it.

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  • [–] 2 points 22 hours ago

    Depending on the amount of data, you might be able to shrink the existing NTFS partition, create a partition next to it of the proper filesystem type, move the data between the partitions, delete the NTFS partition, and expand the replacement.

    But I wouldn't attempt that on ant data you care about unless you have backups. I've done things like that a lot working in the tech industry, and sometimes things just break.

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