Like everyone said, it's fine. They both know how to use the same filesystems, mostly. The only exception is that your Linux install might happily let you mess with or delete essential Windows system files in a way that breaks your install, which Windows would probably try to protect you from. So just, y'know, stay out of system directories
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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It's fine. I used to dual boot the two too, and I use a bigger secondary HDD. It's linux that has the issue if the drive is in NTFS format, I used to get files and folders corrupted all the time and only windows could access and delete them. Not a problem with ext4, but windows can't read that. Dual booting is not a great long-term plan because it's updates are known to delete grub, or that's what I've learned from other lemmy users.
Dual booting is not a great long-term plan because it’s updates are known to delete grub
That problem is overblown. I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux for around 20 years now, I think I've had that happen...once? Over a decade ago? And to fix it you just use a Linux live USB to boot back in and repair grub. People bring it up every time dual-booting is mentioned as if it's the end of the world, but in reality it's a very rare problem and is easy to fix if it happens.
Thank you. Don't have to worry about writing to the windows drive. Just copying data off of the windows drive to the Linux drive.
But for windows deleting grub. Yeah it's a danger. But when end of life for windows 10 comes I'll not longer use windows.
Can second this. Also had a HDD (ntfs) for dumping data onto. When switching from Linux back to Windows, Windows would often show "repairing Drive :F" on startup. Certainly not a great feeling. So while nothing happened to my data yet, I purged windows off the PC. Drive still is ntfs, no issues as long as I am not reading and writing from alternating OSs
I had to copy everything to an external drive and change HDD to ext4, then copied back. Nothing corrupted since.
The only problem I had was resizing the windows partition with gparted. It moved files that Windows considered unmovable, and I couldn't boot Windows again.
Just reading and writing files, particularly in the user directory, should have no problems at all.