[PLUG] replacing versus wiping hard drives for Linux

[Keith Lofstrom]

Often, folks bring their windoze laptops to the clinic,
hoping to make them dual boot.  This is an OK option
for small budgets and off-warranty laptops, but for
new laptops or bigger budgets, it is better to remove
the original windoze hard drive and store it for later,
and install a new hard drive.  Put linux on that, then
virtualbox or vmware with a windoze client if necessary.

Someday, that laptop might need warranty service;  the
windoze hard drive will be needed for that.  Or it 
might be resold, and sadly, most buyers still want
windoze.  Lastly, dual-boot is tricky.  It is easy to
lose your data while setting that up.  Windoze updates
do not share disks properly, and bare metal windoze
is a serious security risk. 

Laptop hard drives are less than $60; for more money,
you can get a very VERY fast solid state drive, and
be happily downloading PR0N while the rest of us are
still booting up.

If you care about the data on your disk, you should
have a /third/ drive for external backup.  Drives fail.
Installs and upgrades go bad.  Batteries catch fire.
And some thieves are stupid enough to steal linux
machines rather than high-resale-value apple toys.

Note - with only a little effort, the linux hard drive
from an older (SATA) machine can be moved to a new
machine, or two machines synchronized with rsync and
unison.  You might need to disable or otherwise deal
with UEFI "secure" boot.  Still learning about that.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com