Will switching from Ubuntu Linux to Windows 7 mess up my data?

Question

I have a Ubuntu machine with five hard drives. Four drives contain all my files (music, videos, ect.) that I have shared with my Mac. They are formatted in ext3, I believe. My Mac has no problem reading the files and such. I'm thinking about getting the new Windows 7 when it comes out and I am wondering if I loaded the Windows OS in place of Ubuntu, if I would need to reformat the hard drives and loose all of my data, 'cause that ain't happening.
Please don't go into a "Why would you WANT to switch to Windows from Ubuntu" crap...I have my reasons.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

As the other posters have said windows cannot reliably read and write to ext3 formatted partitions.

It is not clear how you have your system partitioned. I would assume that you have your ubuntu files spread over the 5 hard drives, and it would depend on how they are set up as to whether you could remove ubuntu without losing you music and videos.

There are a couple solutions that I can think of:

1. If you have another hard drive you could format it to NTFS (I don't think linux can do that), and copy everything from one ext 3 hard drive to the NTFS drive. Format the ext3 drive that was copied to ntfs and continue with the second ext3 drive, etc. Or at least copy all the files that you want to keep. The newer ubuntus can read and write to ntfs. See the first link.

2. Install win 7 in a virtual machine on ubuntu. See the second link.

3. Install win 7 and run a dual boot. You would not be able to access you ubuntu files from win. Warning: this will wipe out grub and you will have to configure the win 7 bootloader to include ubuntu.

All 3 proposals have pros and cons.

Good luck

Answer 2

Windows 7 does not read ext3 formatted desks unless you use a third party program to translate the data. You will stand a fair chance of losing data if you try it.

Answer 3

Yes it would. Windows needs to be installed on either an NTFS or FAT32 partition. You wouldn't lose all of your data- just the stuff on the partition you reformat.