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I'm about to install on my primary PC (tower PC) KUbuntu. For the moment I have Win7 installed. On this one I have 6 HDD : 1X SSD (for the system), 2X HDD of 3TB, 2X HDD of 500GB and 1X HDD of 1TB. All those HDD and SSD are in NTFS file system. I saw on various forums that there could be problems transfering NTFS files on a Ext3 HDD.

My question is, is it better for me to let the NTFS format on all my HDD (except for the SSD because I will install KUbuntu on it) or to transfer all my data to Ext3 HDD (but with a method that will not produce corrupting files and other problems)?

Thanks for your attention.

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    What problems exactly do you expect? Moving files from one file system to another will not usually corrupt file contents. However, if you have special characters in file names, these may get corrupted if your character encoding differs between the file systems. More importantly, if you ever want another Windows system to access the files, these should be on an NTFS file system, as Windows does not recognize Ext3 filesystems. By the way, the default for Linux file systems is now Ext4.
    – Jos
    Jun 21, 2014 at 10:28
  • Hi Jos, I'm expecting the following: when I transfer a video for example from NTFS to Ext4. It seems that the transfered video will not be fully copyed (like when I start the vid it will play but only a few minutes and after will simply display black screen). Do you understand what I mean?
    – LinuxCrusher
    Jun 21, 2014 at 10:36

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There is absolutely no problem transferring data from NTFS to ext3. There is an open-source ext driver available that you can install on Windows. This ext driver for Windows is, in my experience, better trustworthy than the NTFS drivers in Linux, meaning that I've seen less problems with it.

So what you do, is clean up one of your drives, format it in EXT3 and start moving your files over. You then continue to move stuff around until you are only left with EXT partitions.

With those volumes of drives, I'm sure it's a bit of a puzzle but I assume you will be able to create enough space for this process.

Note that this is NEVER a safe option, even if you'd transfer from NTFS to NTFS, if you don't have a backup of the data. You should always have a backup for the data you can't afford to lose. To me personally, everything I cannot (easily) recreate or download again, is important data that needs to be backed up. Everything that I can download again, is not worth backing up and most of the time, not even worth the money to buy a big disk for.

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