So I’ve been putting this off all summer, but with support nearly ending for Win 10 and finally having a weekend to spend on this, and absolutely refusing to move to win 11, I’m finally pulling the trigger and getting this done.
I run a home built AMD rig with a 5800x and RT 7800xt, so as I understand, drivers shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve got 3 storage drives currently, a 1tb m.2 NVME I use for the OS and games I need to run quicker, and 2 SATA SSDs. I’ve also got a much larger external HDD which I’ll use to back up my entire windows environment (which I’ll disconnect after it’s backed up) just in case things go sideways during this process.
My biggest concern is here is moving all of my music, pictures, and docs over after the migration. Is it as simple as copying everything over from the NTFS win10 backup HDD to my newly formatted ext4 drives outside of the OS partition? I’m sure I’m not completely phrasing this correctly, since my understanding of Linux is currently at about a 4th grade level, and is probably why I’ve been running around in circles trying to find answers without much luck. I did go over the Mint install docs, but it seems a little light on details for my particular concern.
If there are any resources, suggestions or advice anyone could offer here to help me get through this, I gladly thank you in advance.
Edit: I think I have the information I need to make this work (at least for now), I just want to thank everyone here for taking the time to reply to this. I sincerely appreciate it!
Um, let’s just clarify a bit more just in case.
You have your pictures, music, videos, and other personal files on what?
On the internal hard drives (hdd/ssd/nvme/whatever) and the backup/copy of those files on the external drive (external usb hdd/ssd, flash drive, NAS, whatever)? Presumably both are formatted ntfs?
What I described above is the ideal scenario. It could be as simple as formatting your internal drives and installing Linux, then copying those files back to your newly formatted internal hard drives. This is going to be fine as long as you are SURE your backups are good. Linux can read ntfs drives and copy files from them.
I’m always a bit paranoid though and I like to take extra steps. Sometimes, you forget to backup a file. Like a save game file sitting in a random game folder, a configuration file (like a blahblah.ini) files for program settings, or your favorites, you get the point. This stuff usually isn’t a deal breaker - you really only care about the stuff that’s irreplaceable like pictures and home movies. But it’s annoying…
So what I like to do is to take a drive image. Not a backup - a bit for bit clone of the internal hard drives. Then you can’t forget anything ;) Pick your program of choice - I’ve used macrium reflect successfully in the past and it was free - it’s been a while and there may be better options these days. Make that image and store it on a large external drive/nas/whatever. Then if you screw something up - you can simply restore your windows computer or go grab that file you forgot in your backup routine. I usually keep both my “backup files” and the drive image for a good long while after I reload a pc. Sometimes it’s months before you realize you’re missing something.
So in summary/my advice.
I would certainly rather take extra steps to ensure I don’t lose something I need later. Thanks for the reply, I’ll end up doing this.
I should note that depending on which internal drives are used - you can use them like external drives for backups. You can copy files and images there, then easily disconnect the sata cable. Then you can’t overwrite it by accident during install. But you get to use the large size of the drive for images and whatnot.
It sounds like you have enough drives to do this super safely with zero chance of screwing things up :)