Can I use same external drive to backup and install new version?

Question

I have an old laptop with sadly out of date 10.04 Lucid on it. The internal drive is partitioned and contains Windows 7, which I never use. Gradually, it's losing functionality, as more software becomes incompatible with it.

I recently bought an external drive to backup all my data on. My plan is to reformat the internal drive on the laptop and start over with the current LTS version (14.04 Trusty), simplifying the partition tree in the process by wiping away Windows, etc.

Question: Can I also use the external drive to boot from and to reinstall the Ubuntu? Perhaps on a separate partition?

Answer 1

The answer to your question is a clear "NO".

You should never ever use the same external drive for data-backup and as booting-device.

For this purpose, i really recommend, to use two different media.

For data-backup, I would recommend, that you use your existing external harddrive. As boot-device, you can either use a fresh and clean DVD (which you burnt the iso-image on) or otherwise - as I do it - a usb-stick. For this purpose, a usb-stick with 8GB space is just enough.

So prepare this usb-stick as your boot-media.

For this purpose, the safest way is, to your unetBootin. I always use that and it took me to clean installations.

Greetings Andrea