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 <dgerow [ at ] afflictions [ dot ] org>
> Subject: Re: [OCLUG-Tech] Re: Laptop partitioning
> To: linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca
> Message-ID: <20091203031220 [ dot ] GA20868 [ at ] plebeian [ dot ] afflictions [ dot ] org>
> 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.
>
>