I want to move to Linux Mint without losing data, can someone help?
How much and what data are you looking to keep?
The best option is to get a new hard drive. You can find one for $100.
Then just connect your old drive to the PC with a USB to SATA adapter and copy any files you need.
With the extra drive there is no risk to your data from the install as long as you DON’T CONNECT THE OLD DRIVE DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS, since you could conceivably choose the wrong install disk. If it’s not plugged in then you can’t choose it
I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.
Also very important to have backups.
I needed my backups 3 times or so, where literally all data would have been gone without them.
You can find one for $100.
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
please do not put your actual installed system (read/write) on a flash drive. linux will let you. it will happily install to the flash drive and it will happily boot up. it will let you log in after just a few minutes. plus ten seconds every time you click something.
please don’t use flash drives for anything other than installation media unless you’re using a distro that’s specifically designed to be installed portably and doesn’t do a ton of disk I/O.
You could dual boot and access your documents from linux by mounting your windows partition. Don’t forget to backup your data before you do anything, especially if this is your first time doing this.
DO NOT dual boot as a beginner. I did this when I started and would screw up something with the bootloader and be unable to boot one of the OSs (data can still be copied off, but installed app data isn’t easily recovered). Being a noob at the time, I even accidentally wiped the wrong drive during a distro hop.
For a beginner I would recommend you remove your Windows SSD and keep it safe in a drawer. Or clone the drive first. Then you can mess around all you want while keeping your original SSD safe.if the data and OS/app installs are valuable then don’t fuck around learning a new system with the drive in situ. Certainly don’t try to learn to partition and dual boot off the same drive. The noob risk is just too high.
The most important thing to do is backup your data to an external drive. Unless you are planning on dual booting (much more complicated) you will be wiping out the entire drive that has windows on it when you install Linux.
This guide goes through the whole installation process.
I would argue the point that installing in dual boot is any more complicated than a clean install, especially given the state of modern Linux installers
Back up your data before hand.
You can use gparted on your mint live session to resize the windows partition to minimal size, leaving the biggest empty space possible. Leave 500mo to the windows partition as a safety net.
Then during the install process :
- choose manual install (not install on a full drive),
- create an ext4 partition for the system (30 to 50 go) with a “/” mount point. It’s the system partition.
- create a “swap” partition (size = your computer ram x 2). It’s the physical memory partition.
- last create an ext4 partition (all remaining space) with a “/home” mount point. It’s the personal data partition.
Once the install completed you will be able to access your windows data from mint.
