Hi, I’ve been thinking about switching from Win11 to Linux Mint due to Microsoft collecting lots of data. My current setup has been cobbled together over the past decade and consists of a C drive NvME, 1 old SATA SSD, and 2 HDDs. I have games installed across all of the non-C drives, some from steam some not.

Windows tells me each drive by letter. I installed Mint on a virtual machine to get a look, but it couldn’t read any of my files. I don’t want to wipe my C drive without knowing that at least the other drives will be readable if I make the switch.

How does Linux account multiple hard drives? I’m so used to how Windows does it that I’m worried about switching over and losing access to my other drives. Thanks!

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    5·
    8 days ago

    just a quick bit of background (terminology below is “close enough”):

    • Windows treats the drives as primary and the filesystem as secondary
      • so all the drives get their letters A:\, C:\, D:\, etc.
      • then you move your folders the drive, ex. C:\Windows\Fonts
    • Linux treats the filesystem as primary and the drives as secondary
      • / as the base point, binaries in /bin, users in /home, fonts in /usr/share/fonts, etc.
      • then the drives get mapped to mount points in the filesystem (you can see the mounts in /etc/fstab)
        • on my system, / is on the drive /dev/nvme0n1p1, /home on the drive /dev/sda2, and so on (everyone’s setup will be a little different)
      • this way the filesystem can be spread across multiple drives but appear to the user as a cohesive whole