How Do You Reccomend Me To Transfer My Data To Linux?

General Linux Question
1

Hello, I’m dual booting windows 10 and Linux mint 20, I really want Linux as my only OS in my laptop, it has a 500GB hard drive, since I’ve been using windows almost for 5 years it has taken up a lot of space in my hard drive when I installed Linux mint I had to allocate 61GB of space, I could have gone for 100GB but I still need space for windows since I still use it for a few things(eg downloading Linux iso, VirtualBox testing, ms office, and etc)so now I’m ready to fully move to linux, but i want to move my files from Windows to Linux, I only have a 16GB USB so how do you recommend me to move my files?

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You can always access all file systems on your computer from Linux. So, you can always access (copy and modify) the files on your Windows partition or disks.

You just need to execute the following steps:

  1. Start Windows. Go to “settings” and disable “fast startup”.
  2. Shut down your computer, restart into Linux
  3. Execute the command sudo blkid. You should get an output like this:
/dev/sda1: UUID="B474E96674E92BB4" LABEL="C" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: TYPE="swap" UUID="ca6d2372-223e-4a70-83f4-65a4071f23e1"
/dev/sda3: UUID="e8c49774-5ab5-4f81-8560-a65d5be1403d" TYPE="ext4"
  1. Identify the drive where Windows is located. Simple enough: It’s where you find TYPE="nfts"
  2. Copy the long string XYZ in UUID="XYZ" of your Windows drive.
  3. Create a directory where you want to find your Windows files. This is called a “mount point” and it is common to place it in the directory mnt. So, execute sudo mkdir /mnt/c and make it accessible e.g. by sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/c
  4. Open the file with “mounts” and “mount points”:
    sudo nano /etc/fstab
  5. Add a line:
    UUID=XYZ /mnt/c ntfs defaults 0 1
    where XYZ is the string you copied before.
  6. Close the file.
  7. Execute sudo mount -a

Your Windows files should now be visible in /mnt/c and also automatically every time you start Linux.

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I never taught of this, I’ve seen a tutorial on how to do this, but I thought I couldn’t write files to windows and it would be unmounted in a reboot

4

Well, we never stop learning.

Let us just know whether it worked and if so, mark the question as “solved”.