Re: A question... New with Old
I have a 512 GB mSATA SSD card from a gaming laptop that no longer turns on properly. So I put that in a 2.5" SATA adapter and used a different laptop to install Ubuntu to it. Then I added that mSATA in SATA adapter to my desktop.
So I currently have 14.04 on my 1 TB drive (along with Win7) and 16.10 on the mSATA SSD. But since 16.10 has reached end of support I need to figure out if 16.04 LTS works for me now or whether to upgrade to 17.04 once I am sure that I have everything backed up. I have only done a version "upgrade" once on an older 80 GB SSD from 11.10 to 12.04 and kept that for years as a backup system in case, which came in handy when my 1 TB drive began failing to run e2fsck including locking out bad blocks until eventually replacing the 1 TB drive which also had 12.04 on it at the time. I later did a fresh 14.04 LTS install to the 1 TB drive, but kept 12.04 on the old SSD until I started playing around with 16.04 from scratch on that 80 GB Intel SSD.
The reason that I am not currently running 16.04 is because I originally had problems with blank screen during boot (no text for BIOS splash or grub menu) until some OS did actual graphics (like gui login in Ubuntu, or Win7 graphics if that was set as default). That happened regardless of whether 16.04 was on the 80 GB SSD or 512 GB mSATA SSD, but only on my main PC, it worked fine for even older computers or laptops. That has never been a problem with 16.10. I put a newer 16.04 release on the 80 GB SSD using a laptop and need to test that on my desktop before making a decision.
So my suggestion would be to leave 14.04 on your hard drive (or upgrade it to 16.04 once SSD is working) to have a working bootable backup system in place until such time that you need the space. And assuming that this is a legacy BIOS system (not UEFI) install grub for the SSD system on the SSD mbr, so you can set BIOS to normally boot grub and either system from that, but still have the option to boot either drive independently. Note that if normally booting from the SSD and an update on the hard drive includes a kernel update, you will need to run "sudo update-grub" on the SSD for its grub to find the updated kernel on the hard drive.
i5 650 3.2 GHz upgraded to i7 870, 16 GB 1333 RAM, nvidia GTX 1060, 32" 1080p & assorted older computers
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