I am making the transition to either Ubuntu or Kubuntu in the next couple days. I have been running the Win7 evaluation version which is pretty much just Win7 Ultimate. Thanks to support from the Linux community I have a good idea about how to make this change but thing seems unresolved ... I have 6 hard drives in addition to my system drive. Two are internal, four are external. All of them are NTFS. So are my pen drives (512MB and 8GB). Will these Linus distros be able to access these drives? If so, to what degree? Everything I have read online so far seems to give Linux a mixed track record when it comes to working around NTFS security, etc.

Thank you.

IMHO, that's because Microsoft (deliberately?) changes the rules on NTFS every 15 minutes

ANYWAY: you *should* be able to read/write NTFS OK. For example, I have no problem with either Vista (yeah, I know... ) or Server 2008 direct NTFS from Linux.

As far as I know, most modern Linux distros have no trouble accessing NTFS. This said, I prefer to keep all shared data on ext3 partitions. On the rare occassions that I use Windows, I use the ext2fsd driver to access the Linux partition(s).