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Is it possible to convert an ntfs partition to ext3?

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3 Answers 3

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No, the only way is to use a second hard drive/partition for backing up data and creating no partition.

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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. Jan 10, 2010 at 4:15
  • NTFS has journaling too, you know.
    – Hello71
    Sep 2, 2010 at 14:02
  • Actually I did not know. Is it a standard feature? When was it added?
    – CarlF
    Sep 4, 2010 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, 2011 at 12:37
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Take a look at anyconvertfs. They mention "converting from ntfs-3g"

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