Migration

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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So I resently bought a surplus pc from princeton university for $63 and I have an ssd with ubuntu 16.04 and an old hard drive with windows 7 and a raid array that is 320 gigabytes, so I want to partition the raid array so that both operating systems have 160 gigabytes per, and that is not so hard, I just need to migrate the windows drive (80 gigabytes) to the ssd (120 gigabytes) which has the majority of it's space filled up, so I made this thread because I need help getting the window drive on over to the ssd, this is my first time setting up a multiboot system, so I'm asking you guys for help.

PS I'm doing this because @snowBlind623 gifted me payday, and that is a windows exclusive, thank you once again, really.

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Sorry, I'm not 100% clear on what you are trying to do. You want the Ubuntu and Windows to share the SSD and RAID array?

I've found that mixing disks between Linux and Windows can be a pain. So if it were me I would keep the OS' on completely seperate disks. I would boot off the Linux Disk and set up GRUB to allow me to select to boot from Windows when I need to.

I also don't bother with using Motherboard RAID setups anymore. In Linux I use mdadm to create a RAID 1 mirror setup for my /home partition and in Windows I use Storagepools - although you need at least Windows 8 for that. Both of these are portable so when you plug disks into a new system or motherboard you don't need to recreate the RAID array.

Given that it sounds like you only need the Windows partition for one game why not just use a single disk for Windows and have Linux on the SSD and disks currently used for RAID - or have I completely misunderstood?

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I want to have windows and ubuntu to share a drive, and a raid array, in other words, yes.

Yes except for the fact that in the future I want to run windows exclusives and not have to deal with a virtualization layer, not just one game.

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The only satisfactory way I've found to share RAID between Win/Linux is over a network ;)

1 Like
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Ok, well I'd still be inclined to take the easy root and keep the disks seperate, but if you are happy to destroy the partitioning on the 120Gb SSD you could use DD from the Linux command line to clone the existing 80GB Windows disk to the SSD.

You could then create your /boot, /swap and / partitions for Ubuntu in the remaining 40GB and /home on the raid disks. The now spare 80GB HDD could be formated to NTFS and have your users directory and page-file relocated to it or just be used for your steam library and leave those on the SSD.

I'd avoid placing NTFS and Ext4 partitions onto the RAID disks, but you could do that - if you are happy to destroy it and recreate two partitions within it.

6

Yo,

I'd do this via a shared drive on the network. so mount the drives on both Windows and Linux as shared drives.

Much better than trying to engineer some fstab foo.

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I honestly want to start anew with my ubuntu install, so I might take this opportunity to re install ubuntu, or to try out suse, and I want to keep my home folder so I was thinking that I could copy my home folder onto one drive and than reinstall on my other drive