I had given drive swapping a thought, but my friend needs to boot Windows
sometimes for
tax submission and another app that drives a non-linuxed scanner. Then also
looked to see
if there was an internal slot for an SSD card, which would really be the ideal
solution
for many, many folk.
So we are still looking for ways to use a laptop with what I will term
PREDATORY PARTITIONING
- possibly use Portable Ubuntu / Colinux ideas, but then USBs are (as yet)
blocked, and I
suspect other things
- scripts that can somehow move / repartition in ways that allow for easy
recovery to
initial state. My guess is that this is some mix of partimage etc. e.g.,
(optional) shrink main NTFS partition from 190GB to say 90GB
partimage the 2 "recovery" partitions and store in the main NTFS partition
(one seems to have drivers, so it may be sensible to copy these
offline too)
clear these and replace
in process prepare a script that reverses the above from a liveCD or
liveUSB.
The awkward bit is finding a suitable test laptop to try this on. Most folk are
not
willing to let their laptop be used for such testing, which is inherently
risky. Ideas?
For information, this morning we installed Ubunto Jaunty to a Patriot XPress
USB. Had to
remove the Winboost stuff at the beginning of the drive and make a new ext2
partition.
Then Jaunty installed in 15 mins. I used the tmpfs fixes to fstab reported here
earlier to
avoid unnecessary writes to this. Also to auto mount the NTFS partition so data
is
available. May see if /home/(user)/ can go there too. Boots really fast. And
the Patriot
comes with a 12" USB extender cord which gets the actual drive out of the way.
My friend
is pretty happy with this solution as it doesn't give computer store an excuse
if anything
goes wrong -- I had a bad processor about 4 months ago and had to get a
replacement
machine and there seems always to be some fuss if the machine doesn't have the
original
bootup appearance.
As indicated, this would be really nice on an internal SSD. The laptop doesn't
have an SD
card slot. Sigh.
JN
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 22:12:22 -0500
> From: Damian Gerow <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Re: Laptop partitioning
> To: [email protected]
> Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> R RENAUD wrote:
> : I don't think it's just Lenovo.
>
> Lenovo makes it remarkably easy to swap out the HD. Depending on how often
> the OP is planning on swapping his OS, it's not unreasonable to pick up a
> second HDD, and swap out as needed. Takes 30-60 seconds to do the swap, and
> all you really need is a small philips screwdriver (or a standard housekey).
>
> I can probably find some spare Lenovo drive trays if this is a viable
> option.
>
>
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