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My 5 year old pristine laptop decided to die. Every time I plug in the power it shorts the adapter so I think my motherboard is gone. Is it possible in anyway to boot into that install from another different Intel based laptop? Through a virtual machine? Or some sort of safety mode?

I know there is naturally a driver issue here but it's there any way to overcome it? I'm running fedora 25.

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    I would advise trying before asking for your personal growth. Many of us are able to reply to your question because we did many tries in the past.
    – Rui F Ribeiro
    Jul 1, 2018 at 20:07
  • If you need to install/uninstall things on that hard drive you can mount it in another computer then chroot into it.
    – Prime
    Jul 1, 2018 at 20:56

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  • Yes, often you can boot and run different computers from the same hard disk drive with linux, but if one of the computers needs a proprietary driver (that does not work in the other computer), for example for the graphics card, there might be problems. You need to boot in the boot mode, that linux was installed in (UEFI mode or BIOS mode).

  • But you can 'always'

    • connect the drive externally to another computer with linux via an adapter or external box, boot internally, mount the partition(s), and access the files.
    • Or you can connect the drive internally in the other computer and boot from a linux live drive (USB pendrive or DVD disk), mount the partition(s), and access the files.
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    You do not even need to follow the same boot style. You can install GRUB into the protecitve MBR of a EFI style installation. You can even add a GPT and an ESP to a MBR-only disk and then install GRUB for EFI style boot. The Linux kernel used in Debian and Fedora is – as far as I know – boot-style agnostic.
    – Hermann
    Jul 1, 2018 at 16:28
  • @Hermann, You are right, but it is often easier to switch boot mode :-)
    – sudodus
    Jul 1, 2018 at 16:31
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If it's just the motherboard dead and the disk is fine, then just put the disk into another laptop and there you go.

You can also use an external USB slot, in which you'd put the drive and then could access it as any other USB medium.

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  • You can't do it directly e.g. connect your dead laptop to a working computer
  • Instead you can disassemble the hard drive from the broken laptop and connect it to another machine. Following this way, you have to option: boot directly the old hard drive or mount it as an external unit.
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