this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Could you share the laptop model, surely there has to be a way to turn off the disk encryption and then dual boot/mess with the laptop normally?
The easiest way to achieve that is to use two USBs, one with the installer, and the other will be your new harddrive. Install to the USB drive and it will be a persistent bootable USB drive. Bootloader (grub/efibootmgr) setup may be fiddly, you may have to try a few times/variations on setting before you get it working.
It's a HP Envy.
TBH, I hadn't realised it had also chosen to encrypt the inserted SD card when I added it.
I would install from a USB to another USB, but the Debian Live USB stick doesn't recognise anything else that I plug into the laptop, so I can't go USB to USB, hence the need to use windows.
I don't know anything about the debian installer, last time I did this I used arch, which is a lot more flexible with partitioning. Is there a manual partitioning option somewhere that will show the USB drive you want to install to?
For what it's worth, I don't recommend booting from a USB. The performance isn't great, and there are reliability issues. On my USB, if I bump the drive, it can disconnect and cause the root partition to become unmounted, and it doesn't recover from there. If you can backup your files, wipe the internal disk and then re-setup windows and Linux without the encryption that would definitely be the better option in the long run. Especially if you intend on doing important work on the machine.
Another option is to try out unetbootin. It can create liveusbs with persistence, but I haven't ever tried it. It may, or may not work with debian (Ubuntu may have better support, so worth trying both if you can live with Ubuntu).