Maybe a dumb question. But is this just a matter of copying over? I have 6 hdds I’ve accumulated and want all the data from them on one big drive now. They are all ntfs as they are from windows, but I am going to boot from my mint drive to move the files, just so windows isnt running or accessing anything on the drives while I move the data. I’m transitioning to full linux, but I want to consolidate these drives first. I dont want to clone drives, so no dd here, just copying files from 6 different drives onto 1.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    2·
    4 days ago

    Extra piece of advice that you might already be aware of: Be sure to shut down Windows fully before attempting the copying of drives.

    Windows fast boot can leave an active session on a disk and Linux NTFS capabilities will often detect that Windows session and thus refuse to perform certain operations. This is more for writing to affected disks than reading from them, but there’s no harm in doing the full shut down on the Windows side first to avoid any potential issues.

    Oh, and if you have other backup methods other than the one you’re about to attempt, use those first. For example, if you have any really important documents, now would be a good time to get them onto a USB drive, the cloud or other external storage that can’t be damaged if something does go wrong.

    There’s no immediately obvious reason that anything will go wrong, but better safe than sorry.

    • applemao@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Appreciate it! Does that have an affect for drives that don’t have windows on them? I should have clarified. I have 1 ssd with windows, the other 6 hdds have no OS

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        2·
        4 days ago

        You mentioned that they’re NTFS, which I took to mean they’d been in a Windows machine at some point even if they weren’t the system drive. If they were taken from a system that hadn’t been shut down properly, I imagine, though don’t know for certain, that there’s a chance that might cause an issue for some files that are flagged as in-use by Windows.

        I’m basing this on an experience I had trying to move an NTFS partition on a drive, which isn’t the same as just copying, I grant you, and Linux resolutely refused to do that because it detected that Windows wasn’t done with the drive. It didn’t say that specifically though, only that there was a problem. It took me a few minutes to figure that one out.

        So, if you were to have trouble copying files, it would be worth a try to mount that drive under Windows, do a quick scandisk from there and then unmount it, which ought to clear any active session flags that might be on it.

        Again, this is all in theory, because I’ve not been in your specific situation.

        (I did once successfully manage to scandisk and defrag an external NTFS HDD by doing hardware pass-through to a Windows VM running under Linux, but again, that’s not quite the same thing, and that was for maintenance purposes, not as a prelude to backup.)