Linux Users-NTFS or EXT4 For Second Drive?

[Phog Allen]

Gents, for those of you who use Linux regularly, what are your thoughts about secondary storage drive formats? The easy answer is EXT4 and done. However, what if it becomes convenient or necessary to connect it to a Windows machine?

One thing I really like about using Linux is that it reads my old Windows NTFS drives with no trouble. This was quite convenient for moving old multimedia files from the XP boot drive to the Linux Mint boot drive. I understand I could quite easily move the individual folders with different file types a few Gbs at a time on a USB drive so it is not hyper critical.

Also, the drive is a 500Gb size so should I make more than one partition? I am new to Gparted but it seems fairly straightforward. Thank you for any help.

 

[oc_in_fw]

EXT4- NTFS is a a file system developed by Microsoft. I wouldn't trust it further that I can throw a hippo.

 

[alaskazimm]

It's been a long time since I dabbled in Linux and looked at the different file formats, but iirc NTFS is a fairly robust file system. I personally haven't had problems with my windows machines in regards to NTFS. If you need to regularly access the data on the second drive then I would go ahead and format in NTFS.

 

[tclobaugh]

Unless you need fairly regular access to the drive from windows ( dual boot is the only situation I can think of, but there's likely more), I would go with ext4. If you need access from a different computer, running Windows, setup Samba (or CIFS, as they now call it) shares.

NTFS is the best option for windows and okay on linux. A technically poor analogy , but one that I think helps nonetheless is, running NTFS on linux is like running FAT32 on windows.

 

[Phog Allen]

Thanks for the replies gents. I think I will go with EXT4. This machine will likely stay Linux til the motherboard dies so no big worries. It was originally XPPro and by the time EOL time hit it was just not performing well. Truth told it worked well for nearly ten years. I now have Linux Mint 17.1 and it is really nice. If not for three or four Windows only programmes I would switch to it full time for desktop use.

 

[jamesspo]

Oh yeah, definitely ext4. I'm not sure I'd even trust the NTFS implementation on Linux in read/write mode..but that's probably just being overly cautious. It was read only for a long time, but probably well settled by now. There's nothing wrong with NTFS itself..it's a well established file system, it's just that the code on Linux may not be free of important bugs at this point. I'll note that Redhat switched to XFS as their default root filesystem for installs at RHEL7 (their enterprise distro), for what it's worth. Ext4 was their prior default.

 

[AvariCe]

Depends. If you will be using it across different OS's regularly, go with NTFS. It that isn't the case, go with ext4. It's simply better.

I don't know about Mint, but on two different machines, one with Lubuntu and another with Kali, I can use my external NTFS drive in its full capacity without a hitch.

As for the partitions, if you feel like making more than one or practising , go for it. Gparted is ridiculously easy to use, and it warns you should any problems arise before finalizing the partitions.

 

[Phog Allen]

James and Antonis, pretty good advise all round. Linux certainly has no trouble reading NTFS drives. I loaded Linux Mint 15 up on an old hard drive, got it all sorted and updated which is only a fifteen to twenty minute job, and then proceeded to boot it up with the old Windows drive installed in the second sata channel. It 'found' the old hard drive straight away and I copied all the multimedia files off of it to a folder on the Linux desktop. How much easier could it be? And it did not cost me a red cent. I am gobsmacked every time I encounter a Linux distribution and what it does...for no cost.

I know it goes against the FOSS acolytes but I would happily pay for the programmes I need to leave Windows forever. I don't hate Windows. I don't hate Bill Gates. I never had any real issues with XP. What I do not like is the constant plea for more money to have functions that should already be included at the prices they charge. Lately they have taken Windows Media Centre(Not WMPlayer) out of the base operating systems and made it something available for an extra price. Something on the order of $100 from what I have seen in articles. And here's the kicker. Go to any HTPC forum or builder site and see what they all say is about the best media centre around. You guessed it. Sure, XBMC is fantastic(I have it installed on my Fire Tv/It is now called Kodi) and it is making inroads like you wouldn't believe. Still, many of the gurus like WMC. It has great A/V integration, excellent TV electronic programming guide, etc. It just works. I had it on my XP Pro machine. Well guess what? The first time I reinstalled Windows(old drive died) I did not have the driver/license for DVD playback. Couldn't find it. Didn't know which app included it, etc. It was a pain. Now they have stripped DVD playback from the OS as well and suggest buying a third party license. So most people are buying things like PowerDVD and paying another $59 for functions that should be standard.

Again, at the high prices they sell retail OS's for this should be included. With their clout they could leverage great license prices. I want to build my next machine and could not believe how much the OS is costing these days. And for awhile they even stripped the ability to install OEM versions on individual machines. They finally relented when the sales dropped like a rock. Like I said, I would buy Linux versions of Exact Audio Copy, PlayonTv, and a number of others if they would make them. They give the OS away, why wouldn't I want to buy applications from the same talented developers who made things of beauty like Linux Mint? There endeth the sermon. Sorry gents, didn't mean to rant.

 

[DanOK]

Thanks for the rant. I'm sitting here with six P4 XP machines just wondering what to do with them. Guess its time to explore Linux.

 

[Phog Allen]

Alright gents, progress and a bit of a setback. I booted up with a usb drive loaded with Mint 17.1 and the 500Gb storage drive plugged into the first sata slot. Mint picked it up straight away. It needed partition tables made since I had just wiped the old XP from it with DBAN. Another neat freeware that nukes drives with a three pass system that seems to get a lot of praise from reviewers. It is not guaranteed to be some forensically safe data destroyer but lets face it, no one is interested in pulling a Mission Impossible with my pc. Anyroad, it cleaned the disk properly, Gparted recognised it immediately, it set the partition tables, and I partitioned it with EXT4. Gparted said it could take some time but it finished up in seconds. Does that sound correct? I

I loaded up the old Mint 15 hard drive in the first SATA slot and the newly formatted 'Storage Drive' in the second slot. Again, Mint mounted it automagically, recognised it as an available hard drive of near 500Gb, etc. So here is where it got a bit weird. It is likely just something I am not doing correctly so hopefully this very simple to resolve. When I did the transfer of the files from the old XP machine I made a folder on the desktop of the Mint 15 drive and named it "Transfers from Windows". I then dropped all the old files I wanted to save in there. All seemed well. If you open the folder there is about 65Gb of files, mostly multimedia, in there. It opens and plays my music rips, videos, etc. So I know the data is in there. However, when I right clicked the folder and selected 'copy' and then tried to paste it to the 'Storage Drive', it would not do it. Hmmm. I right clicked on the 'Transfers from Windows' folder and it said it was only 4.5kb! Yowser. So thinking this had made itself into some kind of shortcut I looked at its properties. No, it was not a shortcut. It was listed as a folder. But I cannot do a thing with it. Weird. There is 65Gb of data in there but I cannot seem to do anything with it. If this is just something this Linux newb has overlooked then please forgive the ignorance.

I looked at the video, photo, and various other folders in the Mint user profile to see if maybe the files in the Transfers folders were just shortcuts to the files. Nothing is in the media folders in Mint 15. I am stumped. Any ideas?

 

[jamesspo]

When I did the transfer of the files from the old XP machine I made a folder on the desktop of the Mint 15 drive and named it "Transfers from Windows". I then dropped all the old files I wanted to save in there. All seemed well. If you open the folder there is about 65Gb of files, mostly multimedia, in there. It opens and plays my music rips, videos, etc. So I know the data is in there. However, when I right clicked the folder and selected 'copy' and then tried to paste it to the 'Storage Drive', it would not do it. Hmmm. I right clicked on the 'Transfers from Windows' folder and it said it was only 4.5kb! Yowser. So thinking this had made itself into some kind of shortcut I looked at its properties. No, it was not a shortcut. It was listed as a folder. But I cannot do a thing with it. Weird. There is 65Gb of data in there but I cannot seem to do anything with it. If this is just something this Linux newb has overlooked then please forgive the ignorance.

I looked at the video, photo, and various other folders in the Mint user profile to see if maybe the files in the Transfers folders were just shortcuts to the files. Nothing is in the media folders in Mint 15. I am stumped. Any ideas?

I'm not familiar with Mint, and what GUI it's using, mainly because all my Linux boxen have no gui installed (I just use command line). What's likely going on here is the entity you see on the desktop isn't really a directory that can be manipulated with the cut/paste features on right click. That would likely work fine inside some sort of file manager application, but probably just doesn't work that way on the desktop. Someone that knows what window manager Mint uses can maybe chime in about where the Desktop content is stored on disk. It's on the disk as a directory somewhere, just like it is in in Windows, I'm just not sure where. Once you find our where it is, you can just use the command line, or a file manager application to copy the files where ever you want them.

As an attempt at help, here's how you can search your root files system for something from the command line:

open a shell
cd /
find . -name *.whatever


Just specify some wildcard that will be match in your copied files, or just a known single file name. That will show you the full path to the file(s).

 

[AvariCe]

As an attempt at help, here's how you can search your root files system for something from the command line:

open a shell
cd /
find . -name *.whatever


Just specify some wildcard that will be match in your copied files, or just a known single file name. That will show you the full path to the file(s).

+1. This will show you where they are stored and you will be able to move/copy them from there.

Thanks for the rant. I'm sitting here with six P4 XP machines just wondering what to do with them. Guess its time to explore Linux.

If you really want to give it a shot, try Lubuntu. It's very lightweight and its gui makes the transition from Windows really easy. Plus for normal use you probably won't need to use command line at all. It's so easy my mother uses it and she doesn't have any kind of problem.

 

[Phog Allen]

James and Antonis, thanks again. That is exactly what I suspected about the folder. It just points to...somewhere. Thanks for the command line syntax to find it. Like most Linux newbs, the command line really intimidates me. Remembering proper syntax is a bugger. I know many guys who like using little else once they get used to it.

Sorry for not specifying the GUI for Linux Mint. They make several versions with different desktops but the one I am using is Xfce 32bit. It is the lightest weight version of all their desktops if I am reading things correctly. Linux Mint is one of the nicest distros I have attempted to use. It is based on Ubuntu so it has their massive repositories but to me, it just works better/easier. It is aimed at traditional desktop users migrating from Windows. At least I think so. It works and is pretty easy to get around in. Here's a link to the various VERSIONS. Thanks again for the help.

 

[AvariCe]

Don't be intimidated by the shell. It may be a bugger, but you don't have to remember everything. I typically go here for the absolutely basic commands and google for the rest. If you write man after a program, it shows you the manual for that particular program.
And if you're not sure about what you're going to do, remember:
Don't use su and don't delete anything.

 

[Phog Allen]

Okay, more information. I found the folder now accurately tells me there is a certain amount of Gb of material in it. I then tried to drag and drop the folder and its contents directly into the 500Gb drive I formatted yesterday. I did make sure to have the drive mounted before trying this. The function just doesn't happen. Thinking this is some obscure rule in Linux against moving from drive to drive this way I then did a bit of searching and saw some comments about opening two instances of the file manager(Thunar in this case) and making sure one instance had the directory opened you wanted to move it to(Storage Drive in this case) and in the other select the folder or file you want to move. And then just drag it to the directory opened in the other instance. It refused to move the folder. So I right clicked and used the 'send to' function in the menu to send it to 'storage'. This gave an 'error creating directory' permission denied with options to retry, yes to all, yes, cancel. I cancelled and made this post Sounds like some setting is not correct but I will give this to Windows, when you just needed to right click or drag and drop a folder somehwere else it was painless!

 

[hydro-magic]

Sounds like a permissions issue. That error message is a clue that points that way. You need to make sure you have read/write permissions in the directory you're trying to copy to and that should fix it.

Permissions are one of the things that can make Linux a little more difficult to use but they do have a purpose so it's worth figuring them out. This looks like a decent explanation of them - http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/309527-understanding-linux-file-permissions

 

[AvariCe]

Try this command in a terminal:
sudo chmod -R 777 destination_folder_path
This will lift all restrictions for every file and folder in the specified directory. Just make sure you don't point it to system files.

Edit No. 2: You can probably do that from xfce as well. Right click the drive -> properties ->permissions and change them from there.

 

[Phog Allen]

Okay, by looking at the drive and folder properties I think it is absolutely a permissions issue. The 'storage' drive says it is owned by 'root'. My folder on the desktop is owned by my user login. So what does the command do you posted above? Sorry to be dumb about it but will that command apply to the destination or source? Thanks again.

 

[AvariCe]

It applies to the destination folder. The command gives temporary root privileges, and then lifts all read/write/execute restrictions from the destination folder and all directories/files beneath it. If you wish, I can explain it letter by letter .

Edit: After you execute the command, it will ask for your password.

 

[tclobaugh]

The comnand gives all the files and directories permission to be read/written and executed by anyone on the. system. You should find a primer on Linux file permissions and the chmod command. I find most file issues I have especially when moving from a different system, is related to this.

Kodi rocks, BTW. Love it!