Using Portable Disks and old Laptops for Linux
Over the years I have collected many devices and some of them were not used for many years.
They included a Toshiba Laptop which boot with Old Knoppix and Ubuntu.
It has no USB port and the CD (no DVD) was without a front end covering or starter knob.
Touch pad was working fine.
They rest were 4 portable hard disks of various capacities and a USB 3 hard drive.
Most of them were filled with various Linux isos.
The newest one I had lot of recent files and it booted with MultiSystem.
I formatted few redundant partitions and left most of the data.
The second one after recovering useful data reformatted with Gparted 64 version booted.
I used my Debian 9.2 and with its Multiboot utility to install all the recently Linux distributions.
The third one I used French MultiSystem Boot Utility to install only the distributions that could be made into squashfs files.
The fourth one took the longest time and its partitions were not visible and no partition table to mount externally at boot up.
I could not partition it.
What I did was to mount it to a computer internally and used Gparted at as a boot CD (only CD version I have except Puppy Linux) format it it had few Megabites of corrupt sectors that was why it did not boot.
When one uses Linux (unlike windows) those those unusable sectors are sidelined and only the mechanically or electronically working sections are used.
It takes ages to eliminate these bad sectors even though they are only a few Megabites of it.
Out of 300 Megabites only 2 or 3 Megabites were corrupt.
I was not ready to throw it away.
So I double check after partitioning and put it back under its casing.
Putting inside the casing took lot of time since I screwed the hard disk to the base and try to put the cover. I could not.
It took sometime for me to figure out and took the screws out slide the hard disk and slide the cover and put the screws last.
The tiny gadgets won't align with screws on.
Finally I mounted it and tried to Install Debian 9.2 and the first installation failed since one of the partitioned I had made did not format correctly.
I sidelined it and Install Debian.
Since this took a lot of time, while it was going on, I decided to format the 18 GiB of Toshiba Laptop and install Puppy Linux (No DVD only a CD in the Laptop).
It breezily installed Puppy Linux, my favorite over time much more than Knoppix and Installed squash file persistence.
It needs only few Megabites but I donated it 1 GiB.
The bottom line is Linux looks after hardware very well and detects minor details and failures in your hardware.
ONE NEED NOT THROW PRICED ITEMS SINCE FEW SECTORS ARE BROKEN OR NOT ALIGNED.
