Got an old laptop from a friend I’d like to rejuvenate, the plan is to set up a light distro so it wouldn’t be as slow as it is right now with windows 10.
Now, I’m aware windows updates can fuck up a dual boot system, so i have a few questions about how to minimize the threat of that happening.
What i think of doing is running a few scans to check the disk, then setting up Linux Mint, because it is beginner friendly, and (relatively) light weight.
What I’d need help with is trusted guides and also tips for setting up dual booting, I’m sure I’ll need to do disk partitioning and I’ve done that before but I’d still want to make sure I’m doing it correctly.
Any help would be welcome.
@BlackRoseAmongThorns why? 🤔 😂 fuck dual boot, boot directly into Linux
Kinda need the old OS, it’s a close friend’s computer and it took too long to get just a few files out of it, i want to keep the rest just in case we missed something.
(Also I don’t want to just backup the whole ass hard drive)
I’d get a new drive. Install a sane os and needed tools and use that. They should be cheap these days. Put the old one in a safe place in case you need something from it. When you find it years on and notice that there was nothing important there after all, recycle it. That’s a much safer approach.
You could leave the Windows installation and not dual boot. Linux can read NTFS volumes. You will probably have to install ntfsprogs or whatever it’s called.
If i understand correctly, i could leave the windows install as is, but disable it from appearing during boot, and install a program to read the files from the windows partition?
If so that’s actually a perfect solution :)
Yes.
To do this, open a terminal, and do this:
sudo apt search ntfs
It will be called something like ntfs-progs or ntfs-fuse or both.
Then:
sudo apt install PKG1 PKG2
Alternatively, the synaptic package tool has a nice GUI
I’m finally back, apparently linux mint comes with ntfs handling out of the box, just opened the file explorer (nemo), and opened a picture successfully.
Only step left is disabling booting through windows.
AFAIK on most distros and desktop environments the default file manager can read NTFS partitions without any further setup needed.
I will check if mint does tomorrow, would be very nice if it does :)
You’re messing with partitions which means there is the potential for data loss, be it hardware, human error, or a random cat. You should, if the data is important to you, have a backup.