[Blood of Tyrants]

Question: I have a laptop with a bad HD. It’s 5 or 6 years old. Would Linux run well on it?

[ShadowAce]

With a bad HD? If you boot to a LiveCD, it should run just fine, though a little slow (optical drives are much slower than hard drives).

[Openurmind]

If the hard drive actually works it will. But not having a working drive makes it a brick and nothing can be done with it. New drive maybe?

[Bob434]

you can get Hard Drives really cheap these days- and they are easy to install- I’d pick up a good used one, and install linux on it or even dual boot- if you are thinking of wiping out windows on the old Hd anyways- but yes, it should run fine on your computer- but try a live CD first to see-

[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

I am posting this from a laptop with a bad SATA controller.

It is booted from an external USB3 drive and runs faster than when it was Windoze, so yeah. No internal HDD needed, but just a bad hard drive? So easy to swap if it is just that. Still run Linux and for when it is a Windows only program run it in a virtual machine Windows session.

[daniel1212]

Question: I have a laptop with a bad HD. It’s 5 or 6 years old. Would Linux run well on it?

I just installed Linux Minti 19.1 on a HP G7 (2012) and it runs well, if no faster than W/7, and the much faster Solid State Drives are quite inexpensive. See my above post for more on this.