[dba-Tech] Hardware Inside Out

As an officially self-described semi-retired senior citizen, whose former
living was made entiely is MS-related products, mostly Office-VBA and
SQL-Server, and who ran Linux in a VM, I want to reverse this stuff.

I want Linux Mint to be my native boot, and thereafter run Office etc. as
VMs, in case, and it probably will happen, that some client will want fixes
or enhancements to apps that I wrote years ago.

I'm dealing with aging hardware, a mere 4GB of RAM, and a couple of hard
disks and a couple of USB hard disks.

I've read the lit and tried it a couple of times, but have never yet
succeeded in a dual-boot. It just keeps forking up, and then I waste a few
days re-establishing what used to work.

I want to boot into Mint 14 and then have a VirtualBox VM set up with
Office 2007 just in case some previous client calls, so I could remain the
faithful servant and possibly make a couple of dollars here and there.

Windows and its attendant licensing agreements are what I wish to escape,
forever. A couple of VMs running under Linux should enable me to provide
this service. But I'm a tad frightened by the task-list involved in turning
this setup inside-out.

Goals:
1. Save everything important that is not resident on local hard disks.
2. Wipe the space.
3. Install any virgin of Linux, current choice Mint 14.
4. If everything fails, have Recover Proccess.
5. The most important things are the documents and Access/SQL/MySQL apps
that I have written, just in case I have to perform some maintenance on the
latter. Everything else is either irrelevant or reinstallable. I can do all
that from within a Windows 7 VM running in Oracle VirtualBox, I think.
6. In the past, I have tried to install Linux side-by-side Win7, and every
time it failed to work as expected, so I have a tad of trepidation.

I suppose that one of the most inexpensive strategies is to score a 1TB USB
3.0 external hard disk, copy everthing that is currently stored on the main
drive, fry it and start over. But in case it goes sideways, I'll need all
that old data, and we're talking several GB of documents and data I'm
concerned with.

The documents are relatively trivial to deal with, although there is a
large number of documents, and this could require several dual-layer DVDs.
The databases are a tad more complex. A few of them are over 30GB each  I
have a wonderful program called Navicat that can easily port an MS-SQL db
to MySQL and then back it up, so I could burn those to DVD. I have another
program that can convert an Access database to MySQL

So maybe the simplest solution is to go buy a 1TB USB3 external device,
copy everything there, and then fry the Win7 install and switch to Mint,
then install VirtualBox, and then install or else restore the Win7 backup
just in case.

Suggestions and novel approaches are invited.

TIA
-- 
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Prediction is difficult, especially of the future.
  -- Niels Bohr