this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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Kinda need the old OS, it's a close friend's computer and it took too long to get just a few files out of it, i want to keep the rest just in case we missed something.
(Also I don't want to just backup the whole ass hard drive)
You're messing with partitions which means there is the potential for data loss, be it hardware, human error, or a random cat. You should, if the data is important to you, have a backup.
I'd get a new drive. Install a sane os and needed tools and use that. They should be cheap these days. Put the old one in a safe place in case you need something from it. When you find it years on and notice that there was nothing important there after all, recycle it. That's a much safer approach.
You could leave the Windows installation and not dual boot. Linux can read NTFS volumes. You will probably have to install ntfsprogs or whatever it's called.
If i understand correctly, i could leave the windows install as is, but disable it from appearing during boot, and install a program to read the files from the windows partition?
If so that's actually a perfect solution :)
Yes.
To do this, open a terminal, and do this:
sudo apt search ntfs
It will be called something like ntfs-progs or ntfs-fuse or both.
Then:
sudo apt install PKG1 PKG2
Alternatively, the synaptic package tool has a nice GUI
I'm finally back, apparently linux mint comes with ntfs handling out of the box, just opened the file explorer (nemo), and opened a picture successfully.
Only step left is disabling booting through windows.
Oh, you mentioned you don't want to keep a backup of the entire drive. That is fine, but absolutely back it up before starting the install.
I would just boot a live Linux image and dd the entire device file onto some sort of storage. That way you can get a bit for bit copy of the drive that you can make it how it was before you touched it. When all is well, then you can ditch the backup. It wouldn't be a bad idea to keep if the stuff is important. Storage devices do fail.
AFAIK on most distros and desktop environments the default file manager can read NTFS partitions without any further setup needed.
I will check if mint does tomorrow, would be very nice if it does :)