I’m now done working until the new year, so I thought I’d put the work lappy on crunching. Normally I’d take the hard disk out and put another in, but the Dell D430 appears to use a tiny disk and a connector I’ve not seen before. At least, nothing I have is going to do it.
I don’t want to install anything on the work lappy’s own hard disk if possible.
Tried attaching an external USB HD but it doesn’t see that as bootable.
Same with the built in SDHC card reader.
Any ideas?
As a last resort, I’m thinking of doing an Ubuntu install into Windows. At least that doesn’t need repartitioning and easy uninstall at the end, but it still means installing something into the work system.
Without leaving a trace, I also considered shrinking the work partition and installing into a separate one, but that’s rather high risk if anything should go wrong during the conversion. Similarly for imaging the disk and nuking it, before restoring later.
install boinc to the external, during install click the advanced options and you can choose where to place the data and the executables.
If you download an older version of the boinc client, install on another machine and then put the entire folder onto a digi stick, it should run direct from there as BOINC was developed to have no external dependencies in the olden days.
The client will run, attach etc, just moan every so often that a new version is available. I know this as on domain controllers the new version is a right pain
Solution found. The USB HD seemed to have a dead controller. It spins up but not detected by any OS. Swapped with a spare and I’ve got Ubuntu installing on it now. The work HD has been physically removed so there’ll be no cross contamination either way.
At least, I’m assuming Ubuntu doesn’t have any gripes with running off USB HDs like Windows does…
@DT, thanks, but I’m avoiding running the work install at all. Too much corporate crap installed.
With a bit of luck, that’ll be another dual core crunching soon
