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Is it possible to convert an ntfs partition to ext3?
Johnny
Posted 2010-01-10T01:52:01.880
Reputation: 151
Is it possible to convert an ntfs partition to ext3?
Answers
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No, the only way is to use a second hard drive/partition for backing up data and creating no partition.
Maciek Sawicki
Posted 2010-01-10T01:52:01.880
Reputation: 1 072
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Agree with Maciek that you can't directly convert NTFS to ext3 that I'm aware of, but it's worth mentioning that you might not need to. Modern Linux kernels can read and write NTFS just fine. Unless you need the journaling capability (greater failure tolerance in the event of system problems or power outage), you can probably just use NTFS for most purposes. All my external drives are formatted NTFS so I can share them between Windows and Linux boxes.
If you're using a server or something that really needs the journaling, you should probably reformat anyway.
Also, note that you can easily resize an NTFS partition, so if you want to convert a Windows system to Linux, you can just shrink the NTFS partition but keep your data, and create a new ext3 (or ext4 or ReiserFS or whatever) partition to install Linux on.
CarlF
Posted 2010-01-10T01:52:01.880
Reputation: 8 576
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Take a look at anyconvertfs. They mention "converting from ntfs-3g"
André van Schoubroeck
Posted 2010-01-10T01:52:01.880
Reputation: 131
NTFS has journaling too, you know. – Hello71 – 2010-09-02T14:02:23.517
Actually I did not know. Is it a standard feature? When was it added? – CarlF – 2010-09-04T23:41:26.110
1It was there since the beggining of NTFS, but AFAIK it’s not supported on linux. – kinokijuf – 2011-12-13T12:37:07.597
+1 I use NTFS from Ubuntu as well, works really well. – William Hilsum – 2010-01-10T04:15:14.560