- Nov 4, 2004
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I just found an old 30GB HDD lying around, which I hooked up as IDE0 slave. It has a bunch of data on it which I don't want to delete and don't really have anywhere to transfer to. I also want to install Linux on this HDD, perhaps a disk install of Knoppix, or Debian. I'd go for Gentoo but since this is my primary workstation I don't want to have a downtime of several days while I set it up (I hear I need to compile everything from source).
In any case, is it possible to install linux on a non-empty Ext2 partition? If so, is there a way that I can convert the entire 30GB HDD, which is currently NTFS, into Ext2? If really hard-pressed I could probably shrink my data down to less than 15GB, and then just do a "Towers of Hanoi" type thing, but I'd prefer not to if possible.
Also, Ext2 is not readable by WinXP, and I know linux can read FAT32, so is it maybe best to go with that? I don't know how a UNIX file structure would be possible under FAT32 though, and so I'm not sure whether I'd be able to install linux on that...
So in short I need some way to use my 30GB HDD so that I can keep the 20 GB of data I have, install linux on it, and somehow get both WinXP and linux to be able to read and write the data.
Any suggestions?
In any case, is it possible to install linux on a non-empty Ext2 partition? If so, is there a way that I can convert the entire 30GB HDD, which is currently NTFS, into Ext2? If really hard-pressed I could probably shrink my data down to less than 15GB, and then just do a "Towers of Hanoi" type thing, but I'd prefer not to if possible.
Also, Ext2 is not readable by WinXP, and I know linux can read FAT32, so is it maybe best to go with that? I don't know how a UNIX file structure would be possible under FAT32 though, and so I'm not sure whether I'd be able to install linux on that...
So in short I need some way to use my 30GB HDD so that I can keep the 20 GB of data I have, install linux on it, and somehow get both WinXP and linux to be able to read and write the data.
Any suggestions?