Linux

Linux doesn't do the drive letter thing. Instead, you have to identify the disks by their partition IDs.

When you install your OS, you'll be able to mount the disks to wherever you like. If you want, you can create directories in /mnt, like /mnt/e, /mnt/f etc. Then you can mount your disks according to those letters.

The main issue you'll run into is disk format. NTFS will work, but its poorly supported.

To get a better idea of how it works, try passing a USB disk into the VM you've created.

In linux disks are more like files, do lsblk -f to see drives and their filesystems, ssds and hdd uses something like /dev/sda and nvme uses /dev/nvme0n1, u can try sudo mount windows_disk_name /mnt and then files from windows disk should be in directory /mnt

The short answer is that Linux should be able to read your unencrypted drives without issue.

Your system drive (what you call today C:) needs to use a standard Linux filesystem, but you do not have to dedicate the entire drive to it.

For external or storage drives (photos, books,music, movies, other media) I stick to NTFS or ExFAT as they are both read by Windows and Linux. ExFat is also compatible with MacOS while NTFS is a pain on Mac's.

just a quick bit of background (terminology below is “close enough”):

• Windows treats the drives as primary and the filesystem as secondary
  • so all the drives get their letters A:\, C:\, D:\, etc.
  • then you move your folders the drive, ex. C:\Windows\Fonts
• Linux treats the filesystem as primary and the drives as secondary
  • / as the base point, binaries in /bin, users in /home, fonts in /usr/share/fonts, etc.
  • then the drives get mapped to mount points in the filesystem (you can see the mounts in /etc/fstab)
    • on my system, / is on the drive /dev/nvme0n1p1, /home on the drive /dev/sda2, and so on (everyone’s setup will be a little different)
  • this way the filesystem can be spread across multiple drives but appear to the user as a cohesive whole

You wont lose access from switching. I have the same scenario. Multiple drives, coming form windows. However, your drives are probably formatted NTFS which doesn't play nice with linux. You will want to backup and then reformat them as EXT4 before long. Thats probably the biggest pain with moving to linux. But it's not that bad. I recommend getting an external backup drive or maybe a cloud backup for a month to have somewhere to put your files before you switch fully.

I made the switch a few months ago after using linix maybe 13 years ago. I rarely boot windows now.

This may help you: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-permanently-mount-a-drive-in-linux-and-why-you-should/

Basically you need to mount the drivers, try this - https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=255060 Unlike Linux, Windows typically automounts every drive on the system with letters assigned to each drive by order of initialization, except for C where the windows installation resides.

Other comments are just giving you solutions without explaining the actual underlying question you're asking, so let me break it down a bit:

Linux is the underlying system that runs everything, and the desktop you're seeing is just a Desktop Environment (aka: DE) running on top of that. Mint has its own DE called Cinnamon. The other big DE's are Gnome and KDE.

The user experience of how each DE handles mounting other drives varies, sometimes depending on how they are specifically setting defaults for each distro. For instance, Gnome and KDE will proactively mount other drives which you can access in their respective file explorers by default, while Cinnamon does not AFAIK. For things like removable storage, all of them should work as Windows does and be automatic.

If you really like Cinnamon and want to stick with Mint, look into a search like "cinnamon automount windows volume" or similar. There's tons of instructions out there, and some responses here have links as well.

Otherwise, maybe try a LiveUSB of Fedora for a solid Gnome desktop, or KDE Neon for a KDE desktop and see if either of those appeals to you.