No laptop just a drive
di i did I
If I understood what you were saying, you advised to get another hard drive to put the new OS on and save the old one to put back if necessary.
Not to hard to do on a desktop box. You toss the new drive in an unused slot, unplug the connector and power from the old drive and connect to the new and load up your OpSystem. You can even leave the original drive in place and all you need do to reverse the procedure is swap the connector and power plugs back. The original drive will never know you put it in stasis. Well - other than a bazillion WinUpdates to catch up on but..
Face has a laptop.
To follow your advice she would need to find/purchase a second laptop drive, remove the original, install the new, and then load in the OS of choice while placing the original drive in a safe place for protection against creeks rising and such. While I agree that is an almost failsafe way to do it (preserves your files and gives you a emergency rescue route should things go awry) it is an added layer of expense. It is the additional expense of that laptop drive that will probably make that a no-go for her.
Setting up dual boot is also not something that you would want a non-experienced person to attempt on her own. Or at least, I would never ask someone to attempt it because I would be the one that would need to ‘fix’ it afterwards.
And there’s a minor problem of at least 3/4 of the continent between Face and I so I wouldn’t be able to fix it.
If there wasn’t that bunch of acreage between us I would already have headed to Searchlight (you know - to sell HorribleHarry a new exercise machine - I’d name it Larry for old time’s sake) and taken a minor detour past Face’s Place to help beat that thing into submission. Or resurrect it from the dead. Or something.
;-)