Persuading to move from Windows - NTFS is key

Admittedly, change is scary. Scarier for some than others. I have a significantly higher tolerance than my wife, infinitely higher than my aunt. Still, interfaces are generally learnable. I don't believe that a different look is what keeps people from changing. If it is, the MS is going to lose big on Windows 8.

The biggest thing that keeps me from trying changing to Linux or BSD or somethingOS is ... NTFS. I'm willing to risk creating a different type of operating partition (though not thrilled by the idea) but I'm not willing to change over all the partitions of all my drives. And I'm not willing to give up access to my data. I've got an internal drive with two NTFS partitions, an external USB with a FAT32 partition, and a NAS which at least pretends to have an NTFS (heaven knows whats hiding below the interface software). I want to be assured that I can get to all my data, whichever OS I may be running. But I don't find any unequivocal statements on your site. Indeed, I have to search the fora to even find the term NTFS. And, of course, those missives are mainly reporting problems.

Tell me, tell everybody, whether you can read/write everything or not.

-----Paul-----

Hi Paul,

yes you can!!.

Start by reading here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount ... Partitions

and:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/luc ... -3g.8.html

I know a lot of the info is long winded but basically you can copy and paste between the 2 operating systems no problem.

Regards Wolfman

I too concur with both Swarfendor and Wolfman. I actually figured this out (very happily) by accident the first time I booted up a newly dual booted Windows Vista with Ubuntu 9 or 10 machine. I noticed Ubuntu saw a partition called OS, which happened to be the vista ntfs partition. At the time, I was new to linux so I had partitioned a mere 20 GB for ubunutu, so I didn't leave a lot of room for music. It was nice to see I could still access my mp3's from ubuntu without having to move them to an external hdd or (worse) keep multiple copies on each OS's partition. I've actually continued to use this method with Win 7 and Zorin. Whether, I'm ripping a cd (shh) or downloading a mp3 from amazon, I push it from Zorin to the Windows partition and that way I can access it from both OS's. Although Windows is getting very dusty. I probably should boot into it to make sure it's really still there. Good luck with Zorin!! It's a really good OS.