If you are serious about moving from Windows to Linux, then try to have everything on Linux, don’t give yourself an easy out. I know from experience that’s a bad idea.
That said, it might also be a good idea to use both. keep a Microsoft partition with the Windows stuff, and a Linux one for the rest. Although that comes back to having an easy-out, so can backfire.
not trying to brag but I have 12TB’s of storage on my system 2TB m.2 x2, 4TB ssd, 4TB hdd. Thinking I’ll make one of the 2TB m.2 my Win partition for the VR games and convert the other 10TB to ext4 for Linux. Does that sound like a smart move @Mirdarthos?
I think so, yes.
@Mirdarthos is there any guide you could point me toward on how to convert those ntfs drives to ext4?
Sadly I have none.
I converted mine by first moving everything to someone else’s external HDD, converting and formatting mine, and copying everything back. I suspect that’s the safest, if not the only way.
The only thing I can point you to is:
And since the yearly win11 updates could potentially break the Manjaro boot, a topic how to restore (always have to installation usb at hand)
I personally added another EFI partition just to be sure - 1 for win11, one for manjaro.
And one more thing: if you play with partitions and decide to shrink the windows one or any other ntfs one - always do it from the windows volume management tool!
As a rule of a thumb, although linux car read and write to ntfs to some extent, and gparted can see the windows partition always perform important disk operations like checking, defragmentig, resizing a partition from the “native” OS (win for ntfs and fat and linux for ext or btfrs)
Don’t do that. Shrink the ntfs volume (do this in windows it causes way less headaches, there are tools for it in linux but since you still have a working win11, shrink the ntfs there!!!)
Then boot back into manjaro and CREATE a new partition with f ex ext4 with the space you got from shrinking and mount that at fex /media/linuxgamedrive and have the ntfs partition mounted at f ex /media/wingamedrive
Edit
Here is a hint towards useful options for mounting ntfs-3g:
users,auto,nofail,noatime,uid=USERNAME,gid=USERNAME,dmask=0022,fmask=0133
This gives your USERNAME ownership of the drive (credentials: 755 on directories and 644 on files)
I would also recommend that over converting. The converting tools and converted systems have some peculiarities sometimes (read: bugs and potential problems in the future).
Then boot back into manjaro and CREATE a new partition with f ex ext4 with the space you got from shrinking and mount that at fex
/media/linuxgamedriveand have the ntfs partition mounted at f ex/media/wingamedrive
That would be Option 1, if you would run the games only on linux, windows will not see them (well there is a way in theory but it is veeery buggy)
Here is a hint towards useful options for mounting ntfs-3g:
users,auto,nofail,noatime,uid=USERNAME,gid=USERNAME,dmask=0022,fmask=0133
This gives your USERNAME ownership of the drive (credentials: 755 on directories and 644 on files)
That would be the alternative Option 2: if you want to see the partition from windows AND linux.
I would NOT recommend sharing steam game folder. If one want to do that, I would recomend a THIRD partition or directory where you can play around with that stuff (has to be on ntfs so windows can access it). What I am recommending is keeping the steam partitions separated per os (ntfs for win11 and ext4 for linux).
Well, I just assumed he had more than games on that ntfs drive that he wanted to access and this is an easy way out to do it. If not, then he can just ignore mounting it.
I see no reason why these has to be separated into “options”
And if you choose the ntfs path, another 2 tips here:
so about 99% of my games are on NTFS. I will just move the games that aren’t VR onto the drives I format to ext4 and leave 1.67TB on that one 2TB m.2 with Win11 as NTFS with the games for VR on.
so one 2TB m.2 will be Win11 with VR games and the other 2TB m.2 will have Manjaro with more games installed and I’ll format my 4TB ssd to ext4 for the remainer of the games I can’t fit on the Manjaro 2TB drive. Thanks everyone for the suggestions and help with this learning curve in Linux (great adventures!!)
@Mirdarthos @Teo @bedna so here is a question as far as space goes. Since I have 2TB to work with for installing Manjaro what size should I make the /root since I am sure 1.5somethingTB will be /home /usr?
I have pretty much every possible program from the repositories an i am still at about 20 GB used space. And another 20 for Timeshift backup. That is, if you do not use snap, flatpack or appimage, they are big.
The rest of my diskusage is /home. Steam goes also there by default. I do not recommend mounting the entire home on ntfs partition! There a lot of system files (.config) there and who knows what will crash if the permissions are not right, etc.
Make it only for the steam subfolder if you want! With the mount command.
Can you give me an lsblk before I giver recomendations, there are a lot of things involved here.
Yeah… You are new, so it’s ok…
But we want this, never pictures.
sorry I didn’t realize
not sure how to show the drive when its completely empty
Doesn’t matter, that is what lsblk shows.
edit
lsblk -f
I want to see filesystems and possibly names for simplicity