On Monday 23 February 2009, John Mort wrote: > A friend of mine is looking to switch from XP to Ubuntu. She wants > to know how to handle moving her data over, and I figured I'd check > here first before replying. My understanding is that Linux has no > problems reading NTFS drives these days, the only risk is in > writing to them. So as long as she has another HDD to move her > data to, it should be a simple matter of coping things over before > reformating the NTFS drive. Am I correct?
Mostly. On Friday I had a friend over who did a dual-boot install of Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 and I occasionally looked over his shoulder to make sure the installation was going okay. The install of WinXP was humorous; after the first he opened IE which defaulted to going to msn.com, and the very first thing that came up, which was repeatable, was "IE has run into a problem and must now close." He did the first "Windows Update" which required a reboot, after which the same thing happened -- but now there was a slight improvement -- a whole paragraph of content was displayed before IE crashed. I suggested he install Ubuntu 8.10 at this point so that I could help with it before I had to leave for the weekend. The Ubuntu automatic partitioning scheme wanted to shrink the disk space WinXP used down to the minimum that it was using already, which would have been a problem, so we had to partition the disk manually. After the install of Ubuntu 8.10 before even the first reboot, a prompt comes up asking the user if they would like to port over their data from Windows, which I believe includes a directory tree of what is on the NTFS drive to allow choosing what directories to copy over. So -- if your friend wants to run Ubuntu then you might want to mention how Ubuntu wants to shrink Windows to the minimum space if installed on the same drive Windows resides on. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected]
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