I currently run a dual boot for Windows & Linux on my computer, but I’m wanting to go to where I would just be running Linux (Ubuntu Budgie) and then have Windows as a virtual machine for the few programs that I am not able to run on Linux. A problem, though, that I have come across is that my drives in my computer that are not containing Linux are set to where root is the owner and I only have the ability to do read only for the drives. How would I be able to get the drives to be fully accessible by me, since they are after all, my computer drives.
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Hello and welcome @JCfreak1087 .
If you are planning to use Linux as your hardware installed operative system, and use windows only as virtual machine, you can format your drives in ext4, and at that point you can set permissions of secondary drives the way you want.
If you prefer to keep windows as a fallback, you can shrink NTFS partitions to a bare minimum, partition extra space in ext4 and use it as data drive for your Linux OS. In this case, I recommend leaving windows partition only for windows, to avoid potential issues.
So, are you saying that the other drives are displaying as Read Only because they are NTFS? I never used to have this issue before though and my storage drives have always been NTFS and I used to be able to have access to them for read & write in Linux.
I am not saying that you can’t use NTFS. If I understood correctly, your premise was that you wanted to move to Linux on the hardware, and windows on a VM.
So all I was suggesting is, since you would run Linux as your main OS, you could reformat your other partitions/drives to ext4 as it is a native Linux file system with great performance and resilience. Even luks full disk encryption if you wish.
Regarding ntfs, we had good support for many years. I use it all the time to rescue client data, access external drives for my clients, friends, etc.
All I was recommending to leave alone, is the windows OS partition if you decide to keep it. The way windows 10, or I think anything after windows 8 shutdown, is a hybrid hibernation and not a true shutdown. Unless you are willing to change settings from windows side, it won’t play well trying to access from Linux.
You can find a lot of reference articles about this topic. I am linking one for you. https://superuser.com/questions/1152001/shutdown-windows-10-truly-for-a-dual-booting-system
I hope this helps.
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The issue that I’m experiencing is that all of my drives that are not the Linux drive which is formatted as ext4 for Linux, while the others are all NTFS, all of them are set to where root is the owner of the drives. As the one using the computer, I can only access my drives as Read Only, I am unable to add or remove anything from any of them and I am also unable to modify any of the files on any of the drives. I never used to have this issue in the past, so, I’m unsure how it happened and how it is able to be changed so that I can have full access to my drives on my computer. I have downloaded a new installation of Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS, I was going to be reinstalling it on my Linux NVMe and then after I would be reformatting my Windows NVMe to become the drive that I would be installing the Windows virtual machine on. Are you thinking that there might be something that could be wrong with the installation that is on my computer currently of Ubuntu that could have caused this issue to happen?
I did some tests on a few USB3 disks, formatted with NTFS. No issue on my Ubuntu 22.04. I have not installed any additional packages on this install, so I am unable to recreate.
Having said that, you can try the following:
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/en/man8/ntfs-config.8.html
Wait, wait, wait…
The read-only device comes from Windows being hibernated or in fast boot mode.
While being in that state, Windows « holds » the devices.
Boot Windows, make sure there to disable hibernation / fast boot in order to be able to really shutdown Windows.
Or from Windows, don’t quit ( which by default actually means hibernate ) but do reboot and choose Ubuntu on the GRUB screen.
If you already removed Windows from your computer, ntfsfix might help.
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@Coeur-Noir yes that is correct. I suggested it in my previous answer. Maybe I was not clear enough.
Another suggestion I want to highlight, if windows is going away and replaced with Ubuntu Budgie, it would be better to reformat all drives to ext4 or other linux native file systems, that will improve performance and compatibility.
True, my reading was partial, sorry.
If Windows OS no longer present it’s indeed unsafe to keep NTFS partitions - since only Windows knows how to maintain / repair its filesytem.
( Isn’t a new NTFS driver supposed to land in kernel soon - parangon ? )
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yep - the paragon ntfs driver is in the current jammy 5.15 kernel - when i ran the suggestion in this blog it said that the ntfs3 driver is installed.
The rest of the blog talks about using the driver … which surprised me since I would have assumed that it was automatic. Maybe it is … maybe it isn’t … I’ll leave that question to the more knowledgable.
I was able to get the access to my drives again by turning off the fast boot, thank you for making me aware of that.
Would it be best to just reinstall Ubuntu Budgie with the new 22.04 LTS image, because of the fact that Windows has overtaken the drive to show the Linux boot drive as Windows Boot Manager instead of showing Ubuntu? I’m wondering about this with the decision to be changing my Windows NVMe to be reformatted to become the drive that I would be using for the virtual machine, would that then cause me to not get access to my Linux drive? I have had the issue before that when I removed all the drives and reinstalled Windows at one point because of the bloat of it, when I put the Linux drive back in, it no longer was able to be accessed and I needed to reinstall Ubuntu on it.