NTFS to EXT3 safely.
 

I have a PC running Windows and three hard drives in it. The three hard drives are:

hda 40GB - For the OS, applications, games, everyday use, etc.
hdb 80GB - My Mp3 archive, it's almost full.
hdc 80GB - Picture, video, installer, document, etc archive. Almost full as well.

Now, I want to partition hda so I can run a dual boot system. I want to leave 8GB for a Windows installation and the rest for Linux. If I start with a brand new HD, how would I go about this? I'm planning to throw in a PCLinuxOS in there.

Now, my main concern are the other two drives (hdb and hdc). Both are formatted in NTFS system and both are almost full. I need to be able to write from Linux to these drives, so I presume that I need to get them going in ext3. I have no space to move the contents of one drive to another, format it, and then put everything back in there. What can I do? How can I SAFELY achieve this? I also do a lot of writing from my home network. On my laptop, I haven't been able to get ANY distro going, so I'm stuck with Windows. However, I do need to move data back and forth with these computers. I need to be able to get Windows to read Mp3s of the *hopefully* ext3 partitions, specifically to stream Mp3s over LAN, etc. I also need to be able to move files I download on my laptop to my *hopefully, again* other HD (hdc) for storage. Will I be able to do this?

I know it sounds a bit confusing, but I need advice on how to do this.

Thanks in advance for all the help.

Unless those drives are vey heavily fragmented, you can write to them (safely!) using the 2.6.15 kernel. :)

The only "safe" way to migrate the data from NTFS to EXT3 is to copy it to another drive, change the partition ID, format, and copy the data back. But why bother with that when the 2.6.15 kernel update might fulfill your requirement with less hassle?

So any kernel above and including v2.6.15 will write data correctly to NTFS hard drives?

Well, 2.6.15 will correctly and safely write to NTFS but any higher ones than 2.6.15 at this time are experimental builds and shouldn't be used in production without very extensive testing on a staging box.

Sounds like a winner. Thank you very much for your time and help.