Repeated hard drive swapping

Hi,

My company has issued me with a shiny new Thinkpad t61. I travel frequently for work and hate to carry more than one laptop with me. I also like to play the occasional game of Civ4, CS etc., but don't want to install these on my work computer. So I came up with the following solution.

Buy a new HDD for the laptop, swap it for the original HDD, install an OS on it and install my games on the new HDD. When I've got my fill of gaming, I restore the original HDD and my work laptop is pristine again.

Is there any flaw in this plan? Specifically, do you think that swapping the HDD often (1-2 times per day) will damage the data on the drives or do some other form of damage?

Any other comments would also be much appreciated. Thanks for reading!

 

As long as you take good care of the hard drives when they are not in the computer, it should be fine. You should be able to boot from external devices though, so you might consider getting a WD Passport or similar, taking out the internal, getting Windows set up on that then putting the old hard drive back. Just boot off the external when you want to play games.

 

Thanks for the reply. I first tried booting from an external drive. But the friendly IT dept. at my company installed a piece of software called "Safeboot", which loads before the boot menu and stops me from booting anything except the "official" windows installation (It also encrypts my drive, which I suppose is useful...).

I also tried USB based solutions like Ceedo and Mojopac, but they don't give me the performance I need. A thinkpad t61 is slow enough for gaming without adding a layer of virtualization.

 

Software the loads before the BIOS boot menu? That must be a feature in the BIOS of the computer, not something installed. Your plan sounds like it should work, though no guarantee that that same software won't see problems with a different internal hard drive. I've had the problem with HPs and their drive lock function before.