Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It’ll read them no problem unless they’re Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.
I daily Bazzite KDE and my NTFS drives are mounting all fine. The only annoyance is that it pops a warning that Bazzite doesn’t like non-Btrfs/ext4 drives every time I access them.
I spent like 3 days shuffling stuff off an NTFS partition and into a btrfs one last week. It’s doable but takes a while especially if you don’t have much space to put things temporarily.
Should probably mention I did it on cachy for the most part, had to use the mount ntfs-3g command a bit
now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware
Are these drives completely full? If not you can likely split the partition 50% NTFS where your data resides and 50% EXT4 so that Linux distro’s can access them properly.
Move the data from the NTFS partition over to your new partition gradually, expand the EXT4 partition and shrink the NTFS one as you go.
NTFS partitions do work on Linux however you’ll experience permission issues and such which is why it’s generally not recommended for day-to-day use, Bazzite is such a beginner-targeted distro that they don’t want the blame put on them if you do something wrong and lose data.
Not a hardware issue; Linux handles NVMe and SATA drives just fine. They probably encrypted everything with BitLocker. Of course Linux can’t access an SSD encrypted using a proprietary Microsoft software with keys that may no longer be accessible.
Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I’m pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.
If you still have Windows, it’s way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.
On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.
LUKS does reduce performance, but I’d argue that modern midrange or better NVME drives already vastly outclass the needs for normal users. Unless the user is doing massive audio or video encoding or using it for a heavily used database, they probably won’t notice.
Source: Me, and I do the above activities and still think it’s fine.
Not Bazzite, this one doesn’t handle NVMe NTFS for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I’ve seen with that issue, and I’ve used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).
Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.
Im loving Bazzite.
Except for the whole “now I have 6TB of SSDs that I can’t figure out how to get rhe data off them without buying new hardware”
Sorry, why do you need new hardware? Bazzite doesn’t detect them?
They’re NTFS. Bazzite didnt like it when I tried to access them.
Plug them into a non-gaming Linux distro like Fedora. It’ll read them no problem unless they’re Bitlocker encrypted. Then reformat them in Bazzite so you can use them for storage.
Bazzite is Fedora, no?
I daily Bazzite KDE and my NTFS drives are mounting all fine. The only annoyance is that it pops a warning that Bazzite doesn’t like non-Btrfs/ext4 drives every time I access them.
It is, but I suspect they’re trying to mount the NTFS from Steam Big Picture mode. Also, Bazzite is immutable, so there may be something funky there.
I spent like 3 days shuffling stuff off an NTFS partition and into a btrfs one last week. It’s doable but takes a while especially if you don’t have much space to put things temporarily. Should probably mention I did it on cachy for the most part, had to use the mount ntfs-3g command a bit
Are you sure you mounted the drives correctly?
Are these drives completely full? If not you can likely split the partition 50% NTFS where your data resides and 50% EXT4 so that Linux distro’s can access them properly.
Move the data from the NTFS partition over to your new partition gradually, expand the EXT4 partition and shrink the NTFS one as you go.
NTFS partitions do work on Linux however you’ll experience permission issues and such which is why it’s generally not recommended for day-to-day use, Bazzite is such a beginner-targeted distro that they don’t want the blame put on them if you do something wrong and lose data.
Do you mean reading the data or deleting the data?
Reading. Then deleting.
Ah okay, is it because of Bitlocker?
You know, I dont think so. I dont remember enabling it
“I love Linux except for <devastating hardware compatibility issue>”
Sounds frustrating, I wonder if anyone’s ever had that kind of problem?
Not a hardware issue; Linux handles NVMe and SATA drives just fine. They probably encrypted everything with BitLocker. Of course Linux can’t access an SSD encrypted using a proprietary Microsoft software with keys that may no longer be accessible.
Luckily there is a new publicly known backdoor so they might be in the clear.
Linux actually can mount Bitlocker drives, even automatically, but you need the key which is usually stored in the TPM which I’m pretty sure you need to boot with secure boot to get working in Linux.
If you still have Windows, it’s way easier to just set a secondary key and use that instead.
On a related note, I would actually recommend weighing the benefit of using LUKS because even with AES-256 hardware acceleration, it can significantly reduce your performance depending on your CPU.
LUKS does reduce performance, but I’d argue that modern midrange or better NVME drives already vastly outclass the needs for normal users. Unless the user is doing massive audio or video encoding or using it for a heavily used database, they probably won’t notice.
Source: Me, and I do the above activities and still think it’s fine.
Not Bazzite, this one doesn’t handle
NVMeNTFS for whatever reason, unless that was changed in the last year. The only distro I’ve seen with that issue, and I’ve used 4 (okay 3 of them were Ubuntu or based on it).Source: had to reformat my data (games) drive. Fortunately, Pop_OS could do that just fine.
Reformatting isn’t going to change how your SSD is electrically connected to your mainboard. Do you actually mean NTFS?
I suppose a distro might ship without NTFS-3g or the ability to install it, although Bazzite should be able to at least read NTFS.
Yes, I meant NTFS
Yeah see I’m pretty sure Bazzite should be able to read the drives. I’ll mess with it when I feel like it