Well, I mean, yeah getting a new drive and disconnecting the old one is definitely the safest way to do this, but honestly is it worth the hassle if you’re just careful about what you do during install? As long as there’s space on the original drive, repartitioning it and then installing Linux on the new partition should be fine, although yes you do have to be sure that you’re installing on the new partition and not the existing one but that shouldn’t be difficult with any modern easy to use distro
Fair 'nuff, risk assessments are sometimes very subjective and that’s totally ok, although I’d contest whether $100 is cheap for everybody. Personally I’ve never caused a disaster when installing Linux, but I’ve also been at it a fairly long time so I’m reasonably confident I know what I’m doing – my first distro was some Slackware version in the 90’s
Well, I mean, yeah getting a new drive and disconnecting the old one is definitely the safest way to do this, but honestly is it worth the hassle if you’re just careful about what you do during install? As long as there’s space on the original drive, repartitioning it and then installing Linux on the new partition should be fine, although yes you do have to be sure that you’re installing on the new partition and not the existing one but that shouldn’t be difficult with any modern easy to use distro
I personally wouldn’t take this chance, especially when a new drive is so cheap.
Fair 'nuff, risk assessments are sometimes very subjective and that’s totally ok, although I’d contest whether $100 is cheap for everybody. Personally I’ve never caused a disaster when installing Linux, but I’ve also been at it a fairly long time so I’m reasonably confident I know what I’m doing – my first distro was some Slackware version in the 90’s