Installing Ubuntu on one drive and access files on the 2nd drive

Question

I have a computer with 2 hard-disks. C: which has Win7 installed on it and D: which has most of my documents (movie files, docs, dropbox folder etc). Recently, Windows became really slow and a friend suggested formatting C: and installing Ubuntu instead. I don't mind doing it on C: but I don't wanna touch D:

Can I install Ubuntu on C: and still access all the files in D?

Please note that my videos folder should be shareable to other computers around the house (with Win7 or Win8) and also I would like to install Plex Server on Ubuntu that will have access to those files.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes you can, since Ubuntu easily accesses NTFS. You can go ahead and install Ubuntu on C: partition and then you can set Ubuntu to automatically mount D: partition on boot. Just follow this post: How to automount NTFS partitions?

Answer 2

Before removing or changing partitions, or before installing any new OS it is vital to perform a backup of your valuable data. Even if you did it all correctly there is an inherent risk of data loss.

Because you are not yet familiar with Ubuntu you may want to keep your Windows installation for "just in case". This can be done from a dual boot installation of Ubuntu "alongside" of Windows where you can choose on boot whether you wish to run Windows or Ubuntu. See

• How do I install Ubuntu?

You can always remove your Windows later in case you don't need it any longer.

In a dual boot setup your will be able to read and write all of your data on drive/partition D: from both, Windows, and Ubuntu.

Only in case you really really want to get rid of Windows you may proceed and install Ubuntu on your C: partition. To avoid data loss please take extra care to not install the default (this will replace all your data on your drive) but choose "Do something else" instead. You will then be able to delete, and create partitions manually. Only if you did not touch or format the partitions that holds your data you will be able to access it from Ubuntu.

If in doubt: do not proceed - ask somebody.

Answer 3

That's doable, however, if you do not want to reformat drive "D:", you'll probably run into problems as it most certainly was formatted using NTFS, then by default Ubuntu will not write to that drive. It is not safe to turn on the write feature on NTFS from Linux because all the information about the disk format is not known by the developers of the NTFS system under Linux.

If you have enough room on C: to copy all the data on D:, then you could:

1. copy the data from D: to C:
2. boot under Linux from a CD
3. format D: using xfs4 or similar
4. copy the data from C: back to "D:" (now under Linux it is a mount point such as /data)

If C: is too small to copy D:, then the best would probably to buy another hard drive and format that one with xfs4, copy D: to it, then install Linux on "C:" and you should then have all the data readily available. Once that is the case, you could format "D:" and use it too for backups or something.

Now, to share the files with other MS-Windows boxes, you want to install Samba. That's enough and it does not require you to have a disk formatted with NTFS. Samba is relatively simple if you do not need super high level of security. Just make sure the Linux firewall is not in the way. You should search references and such about Samba so find out how to get it working.