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Is it possible to convert an ntfs partition to ext3?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 10 '10 at 1:55

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3 Answers

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No, Only way is to use second hard drive/partition for backuping data and creating no partition.

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up vote 5 down vote

Agree with Maciek that you can't directly convert NTFS to ext3 that I'm aware of, but it's worth mentioning that you might not need to. Modern Linux kernels can read and write NTFS just fine. Unless you need the journaling capability (greater failure tolerance in the event of system problems or power outage), you can probably just use NTFS for most purposes. All my external drives are formatted NTFS so I can share them between Windows and Linux boxes.

If you're using a server or something that really needs the journaling, you should probably reformat anyway.

Also, note that you can easily resize an NTFS partition, so if you want to convert a Windows system to Linux, you can just shrink the NTFS partition but keep your data, and create a new ext3 (or ext4 or ReiserFS or whatever) partition to install Linux on.

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+1 I use NTFS from Ubuntu as well, works really well. – William Hilsum Jan 10 '10 at 4:15
NTFS has journaling too, you know. – Hello71 Sep 2 '10 at 14:02
Actually I did not know. Is it a standard feature? When was it added? – CarlF Sep 4 '10 at 23:41
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It was there since the beggining of NTFS, but AFAIK it’s not supported on linux. – kinokijuf Dec 13 '11 at 12:37
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up vote 2 down vote

Take a look at http://anyfs-tools.sourceforge.net/man8/anyconvertfs.8.html

it mentions "converting from ntfs-3g"

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