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!
The short answer is that Linux should be able to read your unencrypted drives without issue.
Your system drive (what you call today C:) needs to use a standard Linux filesystem, but you do not have to dedicate the entire drive to it.
For external or storage drives (photos, books,music, movies, other media) I stick to NTFS or ExFAT as they are both read by Windows and Linux. ExFat is also compatible with MacOS while NTFS is a pain on Mac’s.