I have in my old laptop a dual boot setup of windows11 and zorin os. But I am interested in switching Zorin to OpenSUSE tumvleweed. How can I safely do it without losing the data?

  • Shdwdrgn
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    1 year ago

    If for some reason you do need to move data around and rebuild your partitions, something to keep in mind that I like to do for dual-boot systems is creating a partition using the bulk of the drive which is specifically for shared data between the Windows and Linux systems. You have to format this in something that Windows understands (usually NTFS). Besides having the data available no matter what you boot in to, it also keeps your data safe if you need to wipe and reload an OS.

    • aleph@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Agreed. I had a dual boot setup like this for years and it worked well.

      The only downside is that you run the risk of running out of space in your system partitions and you can’t really do much to resize them once you’re up and running. For this reason I recently went full Linux and set up Windows 11 in a VM in case I need to use it for work.

      • Shdwdrgn
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        1 year ago

        That’s when it’s time to set up a NAS and go crazy with separate storage space. 😆 I currently have 105TB after an upgrade earlier this year.

    • mvirts@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I used to use Ext2Fsd to access my Linux partitions back when I had Windows. Looks like there are better options now, I advise avoiding NTFS for data storage, but it’s probably just paranoia these days.