I’m absolutely new to Lubuntu. (I have not even used it yet.).
Brief background and first question since I am in the midst of a meltdown.
I have a very old HP Pavilion I have inherited – circa 2009 – running Windows 7 Enterprise (sort of) I can only get it to run in the Safe+Networking mode. The machine runs like a champ in safe mode as it has for several years of light use. Now, when attempting to boot normally, the machine shuts down. There’s no way of knowing, but the files could be corrupted somehow. The one indicator I found is a SMART fail indicator for the hard drive, yet the machine ran quite sometime after the ‘idiot light’ first appeared. The hard drive appears to be two hard drives ganged together to create one volume. I’m questioning if it is only one of those two drives which is bad. The curious thing is that though I see 2T on the label of the drive, the machine only sees 1 Terabyte. Does this mean 2nd drive may have failed long ago? And how can they be tested separately as part of one volume?
Here is the Lumbutu question. I have another 500 Mb Barracuda drive that has never been used, and a Lumbutu 20.10 DVD. Could I install this new hard drive with the disk and have it run only on the new hard drive? Should I disconnect the Windows formatted drive before I do this? When I tried to boot the lumbutu system, I get the same pc shutdown within at most a few minutes of seeing the desktop (usually not even that). This is why I’m thinking of disconnecting the original hard drives, but this is really not my forte.
And if I wish to pull files off of the other drive, then is there a way to do this? I believe MS Office files can be ported into some Linux applications with some tweaking, but what about the formatting? NTFS , etc. This is murky for me. Is there even a way to pull them straight across or would I have to take them after transferring to an external drive?