Linux and External Hard Drive
 

Look! Another question!

Anyway, I have an external hard drive that I use with windows...I will be getting my laptop back eventually, but it had to have linux put on it, will it read the hard drive or reformat it?

I think it's in FAT32 format.

FAT32 is a good filesystem for compatibility. EVERYTHING can read it. You won't need to reformat it at all and you should have no problems with data loss risk.

On the other hand if it's NTFS it can read it but writing (last time I checked) is slow (and potentially risky, though not too bad).

Edit: I must be curious -- why did your laptop *have* to have Linux put on it?

Hard drive crashed and I have no repair disc or anything so my friend had it at his house (so he could see what it was doing and all before determining it was the hard drive) and he put in an old ps3 hard drive. So it was free OS or nothing pretty much (because I don't want to deal with the not authentic windows thing...where they wipe your computer after awhile.)

Edit: And I think we should rename this forum to Coda answers questions XD

I was a dedicated Linux user for years before I switched to Mac, so I can say that it's a perfectly good OS for day-to-day use. You'll be fine. :)