Curious if it's possible to dual-boot a work laptop, with it's own OS and isolated file system. The laptop in question is encrypted by the employer, so my guess is that would prevent it from occurring on the same drive, but is it possible to boot off high-speed, large-volume USB drive, if one has BIOS access?
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Dual-booting a work laptop
- Thread starter ryanjg11
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Grimham
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If the hard drive is easily accessible and not in a tray just buy another and swap them out as needed or buy another tray too. That's what I did with my work laptop. Takes all of 10 seconds to swap drives.
pendragon1
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if you have an unused portion of the drive that is not encrypted it might work. a usb drive would probably work too but would be slow and would get bottlenecked very easily. what grimham said about the tray would work no prob unless there is some bios to hdd lock/tamper protection.
B00nie
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Most laptops are set to boot from USB by default. Or you can press F8 during boot to get into boot menu. Just install a live linux distro on USB and you'll be golden.
You might want to read your company acceptable use policy again. Although I don't agree with it, this is something you could receive disciplinary action over.
I'm willing to bet that if they went through the hassle of encrypting the drive, that they also password protected the BIOS/UEFI setup and disable selecting a different boot device.
I'm willing to bet that if they went through the hassle of encrypting the drive, that they also password protected the BIOS/UEFI setup and disable selecting a different boot device.
Vermillion
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I don't know where you work but I've never seen any business go that far. Even on the government laptops I work with I can get into the BIOS no questions asked. Now of course you couldn't get away with a dual-boot on a gov't machine because of auditing and the image but BIOS is still available.
For my actual encrypted work laptop? BIOS fully available. So I wiped off the crap ass OS called Windows 10 and loaded up an encrypted Arch LInux with a VM of Windows 10 for work stuff I absolutely need Windows for.
It's been a very common practice at every company I've been with since 2007ish. Password protected BIOS, forced HDD/SDD boot. As much as I would like to run BSD or Linux on my laptop (especially considering I'm an AIX engineer), the company I'm at not would never allow that to happen. I even asked for a Mac once and got turned down. Annoyingly, our security team and marketing team all have Macs.
If I did have the option to USB boot, I would just get an ultra-low profile USB drive and run BSD or Linux on there.
B00nie
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pendragon1
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but then the company can say you cant use your personal laptop for business use because its unsecure and you end up with two.That's why it pays to be an owner, nobody tells you what you can or can't do
B00nie
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That would be ok with me. I don't approve using your work laptop for personal use anyway.