Hi, I’ve been thinking about switching from Win11 to Linux Mint due to Microsoft collecting lots of data. My current setup has been cobbled together over the past decade and consists of a C drive NvME, 1 old SATA SSD, and 2 HDDs. I have games installed across all of the non-C drives, some from steam some not.
Windows tells me each drive by letter. I installed Mint on a virtual machine to get a look, but it couldn’t read any of my files. I don’t want to wipe my C drive without knowing that at least the other drives will be readable if I make the switch.
How does Linux account multiple hard drives? I’m so used to how Windows does it that I’m worried about switching over and losing access to my other drives. Thanks!
Other comments are just giving you solutions without explaining the actual underlying question you’re asking, so let me break it down a bit:
Linux is the underlying system that runs everything, and the desktop you’re seeing is just a Desktop Environment (aka: DE) running on top of that. Mint has its own DE called Cinnamon. The other big DE’s are Gnome and KDE.
The user experience of how each DE handles mounting other drives varies, sometimes depending on how they are specifically setting defaults for each distro. For instance, Gnome and KDE will proactively mount other drives which you can access in their respective file explorers by default, while Cinnamon does not AFAIK. For things like removable storage, all of them should work as Windows does and be automatic.
If you really like Cinnamon and want to stick with Mint, look into a search like “cinnamon automount windows volume” or similar. There’s tons of instructions out there, and some responses here have links as well.
Otherwise, maybe try a LiveUSB of Fedora for a solid Gnome desktop, or KDE Neon for a KDE desktop and see if either of those appeals to you.