[vox-tech] Data Conversion From M$ to Linux Question

[Rod Roark]

I believe there's reliable NTFS read-only support now in the
Linux kernel.

It sounds like you should invest in another large drive.
If the data is important to you, don't you think you'll want
a backup medium?  All hard drives eventually fail.

-- Rod

On Saturday 08 May 2004 11:21 am, Daniel Hurt wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I am finally getting ready to convert from M$ on my desktop to Linux.  I 
> realized lately that I am not using my desktop at all except to listen 
> to music, watch movies and check email.  I began to long for the ease of 
> use, configurability, responsiveness, reliability and speed of Linux 
> that I have on my Linux laptop.  M$ frequently slows down, programs 
> crash and I do not like it at all.  My 800 MHz Celeron laptop running 
> Gentoo Linux is much more responsive and better handling than my desktop 
> which has 3x the RAM and an Athlon XP 1600.  Oh well.
> 
> I finally was able to conquerer my last obstacle in the conversion. 
> Conversion of all my email into a program that runs on Linux.  I found 
> the solution in Mozilla Thunderbird.  It runs on both windows and Linux. 
>   The import tools on the windows platform are excellent!  I was able to 
> convert ALL my email (4 years worth) and ALL my address from outlook 
> 2003 without a problem.  Then I was just able to copy all the files from 
> that profile on my windows machine to my laptop running linux.  Started 
> up Thunderbird on my laptop and all my emails where there, minus the 
> attachments, but that is not a problem.
> 
> So the next hurdle that I have is the conversion of my multimedia data 
> from my desktop.  I have 300Gb of data approximately stored on NTFS 
> disks that I would like to keep and I am trying to figure out the best 
> way to do that and then convert my disks to a Linux File System like 
> reiserFS or XFS.
> 
> Setup:
> Disk 1 - 80GB ( need 10GB of data from ) *** In Linux use as /
> Disk 2 - 120 GB ( need 60GB of data from )
> Disks 3,4 - RAID 1 - 400GB ( need 250GB of data from )
> 
> So there is too much data to drop it on one disk,  convert the other two 
> drives, copy the data and then convert the final drive.  So I see 
> several options:
> 
> 1) Burn all the data to CD-R or DVD-R.  Install Linux and then copy 
> back.  Drawbacks: will get pricey for all the disks.  Slow.  I have had 
> problems with CD-Rs getting corrupted in the burn process and loosing 
> the data if I do not verify all the data after burning (slow).  Finally, 
> some of the files are GB in size, and so I will have to split the files 
> before burning if I use CD-R.  (Side note:  I assume that there is a 
> program for joining AVI files on Linux seeing as there are some good 
> utilities for M$.
> 
> 2) Similar to above.  But put as much data as possible on the 120GB 
> drive (Maybe setup another partition on the 80GB drive and store some 
> there), and then burn the rest to CDr/DVDr.  Setup the partitions and 
> install Linux.  Then mount the disk using NTFS support and copy the 
> data.  Problems, do not know what the status of NTFS file support on 
> Linux.  Last time I looked into it was 3 years ago and read support was 
> buggy, write support was only if you were crazy.  Seems like the most 
> efficient option.
> 
> 3) Buy another drive that can hold that much data and drop it on there, 
> then use that to handle the data transfer. (Very expensive for a drive 
> of that size).
> 
> Any thoughts or comments would be most welcome.  My final question is 
> regarding hardware RAID for IDE.  Is that best handled by the hardware 
> controller or should I look into some of the Linux tools for 
> accomplishing this through software?
> 
> Thanks In Advance,
> 
> Dan Hurt