The best option is to get a new hard drive. You can find one for $100.
Then just connect your old drive to the PC with a USB to SATA adapter and copy any files you need.
With the extra drive there is no risk to your data from the install as long as you DON’T CONNECT THE OLD DRIVE DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS, since you could conceivably choose the wrong install disk. If it’s not plugged in then you can’t choose it
I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
please do not put your actual installed system (read/write) on a flash drive. linux will let you. it will happily install to the flash drive and it will happily boot up. it will let you log in after just a few minutes. plus ten seconds every time you click something.
please don’t use flash drives for anything other than installation media unless you’re using a distro that’s specifically designed to be installed portably and doesn’t do a ton of disk I/O.
The best option is to get a new hard drive. You can find one for $100.
Then just connect your old drive to the PC with a USB to SATA adapter and copy any files you need.
With the extra drive there is no risk to your data from the install as long as you DON’T CONNECT THE OLD DRIVE DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS, since you could conceivably choose the wrong install disk. If it’s not plugged in then you can’t choose it
I second this, second disk is best as you can keep your old Windows drive in case you ever need to go back for any reason. Modern UEFI makes dual booting way easier than it used to be as the UEFI itself provides a boot menu so you don’t need to fiddle with dual booting using a bootloader like GRUB.
You can get them substantially cheaper than that! but your point holds. A USB stick is also rather cheap - you can get a 128GB SANDisk jobbie for £10 a pop on Amazon.
please do not put your actual installed system (read/write) on a flash drive. linux will let you. it will happily install to the flash drive and it will happily boot up. it will let you log in after just a few minutes. plus ten seconds every time you click something.
please don’t use flash drives for anything other than installation media unless you’re using a distro that’s specifically designed to be installed portably and doesn’t do a ton of disk I/O.
This is the best option, I agree. This way you have a dedicated disk for linux and you can copy your data from the old drive.
Still, backup your data if you’re doing any of this.
Also very important to have backups.
I needed my backups 3 times or so, where literally all data would have been gone without them.
Honestly, I’d only use the new external drive for making backups. Then install Linux on the computer’s internal disk