This sounds like a nefarious question but it's really not. I have a work laptop and I need to get some personal planning done after work tomorrow. Naturally I don't want to carry 2 laptops or run the laptop on the internal hard drive for personal use, but going back home and out again is very inconvenient. So my question is - would dual booting via an SSD (that I already use on another machine) leave any trace on the internal hard drive?

Honestly, I don't expect this to ever be a real issue, I doubt anyone will ever check or even care, but I just want to keep my work stuff entirely separate from my personal stuff. So if there's a fair chance I could muddy the two in any way by doing this, I won't - but it's my understanding that dual booting would be more or less adequately secure?

  • unperson [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    You can read and modify what's on one drive from the other, so you could mess up if you're careless. If you want better isolation, leave only one drive installed at a time.

    Windows won't like you doing this: it will reboot many times to install drivers and may mark your install as pirated. Linux generally does not care if you move it to a different computer.