My Thinkpad has returned, this time in full working order. Plus, X.org appears to no longer crash sporadically on login with fglrx, an improvement I did not expect out of this particular repair.

Now, I must figure out how to encrypt my hard disk, in order to avoid it being violated by Border Patrol agents. From preliminary research, it does not appear that this can be accomplished in place, which will thus require a reinstall, or at least copying the partitions off the machine to someplace else. With Partimaged, this is a fairly viable approach, however it will require a reasonably local machine with 40-60GB of free space.

An alternative approach is simply to buy a second hard drive and caddy, and simply swap when making such trips, a viable option given that changing hard drives on a Thinkpad takes less then a minute. However, this does not appear to be a very long term solution, given that it seems to me that it is only a matter of time before such shenanigans appear at airports as well. Never the less, this does appear to be the interim solution of choice.

Posted on 2009-01-26, 19:29 0 Comments so far.