Re: Planning a new Debian box!

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 5:54 PM, David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> wrote:

On 03/26/2015 04:38 PM, Patrick Bartek wrote:

Shortly I will become the owner of a refurbished Dell
with Win7 already on its 160g sata hard drive.
I have no need or use for a multi-OS multi-boot
machine. I only want wheezy on this for now.

I hated dual-boot -- getting it working was painful enough. But constantly rebooting and switching OS's to get something useful done was a PITA. Hot-swap bays and multiple drives eliminates the first problem (and simplifies imaging, backups, restores, and other administrative chores; I recommend it). Multiple computers with one O/S each is best.

After wrestling with making a Windows 8.1/Jessie dual boot box a while, and finding it unbearably distasteful, my solution was to install physical switches onto the back panel to turn on/off the Windows drive, and another to turn on/off the Jessie boot/system drive. I just throw the switches prior to powering on the box and it works great.

Having SATA drives, I used double pole/double throw switches to make and break connections to the red and the yellow power leads to the drives in question.

A benefit to this "solution" is you don't have to deactivate Windows hibernate/sleep modes which I believe you must if you do a traditional dual boot. Also, you cannot obviously use one or the other drives at all at times, but I have a third HDD which is unswitched and has a NTFS partition to exchange data between the OS's