Share files and folders between W10 and Linux.

[luiHS]

Hi.

I am going to install Windows 10 and Linux (Ubuntu) on the same SSD hard disk. I also have three other hard disk with data that I currently access from Windows 7.

The question is whether it is possible that the Linux installation can access the files and folders that I now have on those three other hard disk that I access from Windows, and which are formatted as NTFS.

In particular I am interested in being able to access the files of the Thunderbird email reader, to be able to manage the email both from Windows 10 and from Linux.

I may also be interested in accessing files created with LibreOffice and others, both from W10 and from Linux. Or create files in Linux that I can later use from Windows and vice versa, the data always being on other hard drives, not on the operating system's startup disk.

[fable]

With Linux you can access all drives and partitions no problem but with windows you can't access Linux partition so you will need software for that

[nctnico]

One way would be to run Linux or Windows in a virtual machine and access the host files through a network share. Another option is to look at WSL (running Linux under Windows directly). Both remove the requirement of dual booting which just sucks.

[PKTKS]

Waaaaaayyyyyy  back in 80s...

MS bought or "acquired" or whatever they need at time to
have some stuff to charge license fees for and literally implode
whoever gets in their way..

LAN Manager.. LANtastic.. whatever they did to rename that shit
it is a NetBIOS SMB Frankenstein dated 80s and suited to fill the
gap where Novell Netware was prevalent..

So..  by 90s they had a functional "GUI" with that  shitty services
where you are allowed to "share"  (your stuff) files.. printers..
with networked *windoozeee*  OS.. (by that time OS/2 already
had such similar SMB based stuff).. but interoperability of course
was never in the agenda..

So.. that 80s crap shit is still there..  mostly as their
solution to allow you to access your stuff (aside their new CLOUD)

Go SAMBA where that shit is functional and you can set a fully
operational interclient/server with whatever MS brain dead machine
and access all your stuff..

including printers... as long as they never ever allowed remote
printing services work as they should...

The DIGITAL LANDLORDS will never ever play nice..
you can bet that..

But any  SAMBA release  works  out of the box
as long your kernel is provided w/recent CIFS and
other shit evolved from that crap..

Paul 

[coromonadalix]

personally i would dual boot the computer with separate oses on each drive, you kick the bios boot option and choose the needed drive ?

Since you can use the same softwares between linux and windows :  thunderbird   libreoffice  .... i would not take the chance of fuc$#$$# something between the ose's

You have some linux utilities to dual boot a system ...  i'm not a linux fan    but i use Zorin Os  loll

If i recall  you have to install windows first,   linux based os'es  should see windows and offer a dual boot option ??

Or G-parted and Grub can help if i recall ??

[Monkeh]

Format one of your drives as exFAT and you can read and write to it from both systems with no difficulties. Walls of text not required.

[themadhippy]

Format one of your drives as exFAT and you can read and write to it from both systems with no difficulties

dont even need to go that far,linux plays nicely  with nfts

[Monkeh]

Format one of your drives as exFAT and you can read and write to it from both systems with no difficulties

dont even need to go that far,linux plays nicely  with nfts

Nicely-ish. I have limited trust in the various open implementations. Frankly, even the Windows implementation is a little.. iffy.

[Ian.M]

+1.  Linux NTFS support has vastly improved over the last decade or so but NTFS is a proprietary poorly documented moving target.  If a NTFS filesystem is mounted R/W under Linux, IMHO there's *still* a higher risk of corruption than for a native Linux or FAT based filesystem.

[nctnico]

Format one of your drives as exFAT and you can read and write to it from both systems with no difficulties

dont even need to go that far,linux plays nicely  with nfts

I'd go for exFAT. As others said: NTFS is iffy and not without it's problems.

[retiredfeline]

In particular I am interested in being able to access the files of the Thunderbird email reader, to be able to manage the email both from Windows 10 and from Linux.

I may also be interested in accessing files created with LibreOffice and others, both from W10 and from Linux.

This is iffy and the devil is in the details for each program. A program or suite may be cross-platform but that doesn't mean the internal file formats will be the same for all platforms.

For LibreOffice, the file formats should be interchangeable given that they can be exported. For Thunderbird's mail folders, I would check for howto's of people who have tried it, and any special things they had to do. I seem to remember that it can be made to work, but check before you risk your mail files.

[PKTKS]

Judging by some comments it seems that some folks just
forgotten how MS changed their *.INI  files more or less circa
version Win-2000 to complete REGISTRY stored keys..

Several important programs aspects and data became hidden
inside that crap unmanageable crock of...

Even the "recent file list" on vast majority applets are hidden
in registry keys.. that said it is unlikely programs wo access
to that crap would work as they should..  expect weird stuff.

That said .. as pointed all my VMs are interoperable using SAMBA SMB/CIFS
among them in which I can access what matters on same machine
or ....  remote machines...

Far from ideal but better than nothing and "SAFE" as it should be.

Truth is .. ditch that crap windooozzzee ASAP..   
Paul

[Monkeh]

Judging by some comments it seems that some folks just
forgotten how MS changed their *.INI  files more or less circa
version Win-2000 to complete REGISTRY stored keys..

Or we're aware of the irrelevance of the registry for programs designed to operate effectively on multiple platforms, and aren't justifying useless rants.

[PKTKS]

Your insults always make my days...   

so far I am still trying to find these programs
"designed to work everywhere..."

May be ..some day...
Thanks for your always kind suggestions..

Paul 

[Siwastaja]

Really, haven't seen any issues whatsoever in linux NTFS support in years. It's a really common use case.

No need to overthink it, most likely it Just Works out of the box; in other words, install Windows, then install Linux, all Windows partitions are directly available in Linux.

Opposite way requires more work - i.e., installing linux filesystem (ext4 or whatever) drivers in Windows.

[ejeffrey]

Yeah NTFS under linux pretty much just works for ages.

WSL can mount and access ext4 filesystems but native windows apps can't without installing  a third party driver.  I think WSL takes over the entire device so that is an argument for using separate drives for Windows and Linux.

I used to use the ext2 filesystem driver for Windows in the windows XP days, I'm not sure what the status of that is these days.

[magic]

I was under impression that exFAT is a pile of rubbish barely better than FAT32.

NTFS works and is easy to recover data from if SHTF. Not sure what the objections are, did MS screw something up in recent years? I have been pretty much Windows-free for the last decade, so perhaps not up to date.

[mansaxel]

In general, I am incompetent, and have a bad attention span. Still, I want things to work immediately, and without fuss. Therefore, I run one OS per computer, and communicate between the systems using networks.  If the number of physical computers is to low, there's virtualisation. Further, I believe that important files belong on a computer with UPS and mirrored drives, where backups are taken regularly, in some form of climate controlled facility. This gives the added benefit of making them available to several computers simultaneously, again via networking.

My particular file system perversion is OpenAFS (on FreeBSD with ZFS storage), but that is not for everyone. A FreeNAS install is more likely to fulfil people's needs; then there's SMB and NFS.

So, my advice is to do it differently, if at all possible. Dual-boot sucks (you're always in the one OS when you need an utility only available in the other) and is risky.

[Calaverasgrande]

Linux and MacOS for that matter, have no trouble with NTFS, ExFAt, Fat32 etc.
I'd go with Fat32 or ExFat simply to avoid any permissions conflicts when two differenet operating systems are taking turns on a filesystem with clunky permissions.
When I worked in broadcast this was a very real issue.

Also, having gone down this road many times, I'd heavily advise against trying to put two OS on one disc.
I've never seen Windows happy like this. Even if you partition the disc into volumes you still have to wrangle a bootloader that they will both be happy with. UEFI only makes this worse.
It's much more preferable to have them on distinct drives and choose which is the boot drive from BIOS, or a Linux loader.

[Karel]

NTFS-3G and Ntfsprogs

NTFS-3G is a stable, full-featured, read/write NTFS driver for Linux, Android, macOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, QNX, Haiku, and other operating systems.
It provides safe handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 NTFS file systems.
NTFS-3G uses the FUSE file system interface.

Ntfsprogs is a set of utilities for managing and interacting with NTFS partitions. In 2011, we merged Ntfsprogs with NTFS-3G.
The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2)

It's installed by default by most distro's.

https://www.tuxera.com/company/open-source/

[Calaverasgrande]

another consideration.
There has been a huge uptick in malware and hacker activity in general over the last decade.
When I got into IT work dealing with malware was an occasional thing.
In the last few years it has become a huge part of enterprise computing.
We once had our postal meter hacked! Which by the way was running Linux, so if anyone thinks Linux is so cool it doesn't get hacked...
I can reel off a bunch of funny anecdotes about hackers, malware etc.
But the point is that malware is on the minds of people who engineer these operating systems.
For this reason Windows is going to look sideways at any other operating system it finds on "their storage".
That is what a some remote Access Tools look like. Distros!
Microsoft knows that some people dual boot. But it's just not as robust about this as MACOS or Linux.
Then there is that god damned Windows 10 update thing.
Good luck having that continue to play nice with another operating system once you have them cooperating.
I've seen Win 10 automatic updates take down all kinds of normal software. And more than once just wreck a good system to the point we erased it and started over.

[ebclr]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about

You also have the option to use VMware for virtual machines with Linus, in this case, will be a graphical drag and drop, ins any direction

[Karel]

I believe the best approach is single boot Linux, with VMware to run windows
(or Virtualbox for maker/hobbyist/home use).

Ofcourse, make sure your pc is Linux compatibel, specially the graphics card.
Do NOT use nvida cards! Use AMD with the default opensource drivers.
Do NOT install any closedsource videodrivers.

On Linux you can assign a directory which content will be shared with windows.
In windows this appears as a networkdrive. Files can be shared in both directions.

This is the most safe and reliable setup.


In the past I have used a Linux windows 7 dualboot setup using separate harddisks.
Windows was installed first on the first harddisk and Linux after that on the second.
The bootloader was Grub.
This worked reasonably apart from that you can't use both systems at the same time which is a pitty.
Then, after some years, microsoft started to release some updates that required to restart the pc,
continued to install some update, and restarted the pc again. Some of these updates didn't play well with
a dualboot with Linux (Grub). During the second phase of the installation of the update, windows reported
that it was not able to install the update and reverted it. It puzzled me but after some time I discovered
that, when I disconnected the second harddisk with Linux and instructed the bios to boot from the first disk,
the installation of these problematic updates went fine.
So, from that moment, every time when there were new updates, I risked to loose time caused by some
windows update that didn't play nice with Grub and dualboot Linux and I had to open the pc, disconnect the
sata cable to the second disk, change a bios setting, boot windows, perform the problematic update,
and do everything again in the reverse order.

So, after some more time I decided that enough was enough and I pulled out the windows disk,
installed virtualbox and windows on top of Linux.

I couldn't be more happier.

I don't know if these problems still exist with windows 10. I'm not going to try because over the years I
have lost all my trust in microsoft and even if they changed their nasty behaviour, I'll continue to avoid them
like the plague, just because of what they did in the past.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.