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Converting an Old NTFS Drive to ext4 on Arch Linux (The “Nuke and Pave” Method)

A practical, step-by-step guide on wiping a Windows NTFS hard drive and preparing it for native Arch Linux use. The post walks you through using cfdisk to recreate the partition table, forcing a format with mkfs.ext4 to overwrite stubborn NTFS signatures, configuring auto-mounting via /etc/fstab, and resolving the common ext4 root-ownership permission block so that the drive is fully usable by your user account