ulvheid

What's about BIOS updates? Do you have the latest release? Sometimes old versions of BIOS can have some problems with booting from external drive. For example, in my work, I had a Dell laptop and it couldn't start from external drive connected with. If you still have the motherboard mentioned in your signature and if you have an old version of BIOS, check out your manual: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1366/Sabertooth_X58/e5995_sabertooth_X58.pdf (Section 3.2) Here you can download firmware for your motherboard's BIOS. https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_X58/HelpDesk_BIOS/ Have you checked every USB ports? What if you connect your external drive to USB 2.0? Or to USB 3.0? Have you used other cable?

HDD is not damaged, right? Have you checked it with some software? You can use Hiren's Boot for this thing, if you don't have access to Thinkpad or your mum's computer. It looks like hardware problem, not caused by OS. If you have (still) access to Windows on this external HDD and you can boot it, check disk for bad sectors with HD Tune. You can also look up for a solution in event logs (Windows Logs > System) and make a view with a specific parameters. Windows usually saves some informations about errors on your disks.

You can looking for the driver by using Vendor ID and Device ID. Use Device Hunt or The PCI ID Repository Or USB ID Database (the sz development). They have guides. Or use for this a software updating drivers. But it is not recommended.

Hello, you can check out Recalbox, but there is no guarantee it will work fine. Without testing you won't get to know (especially with Atom processor). It's a nice OS with all what you need to run old games. Eventually you can install lightweight Arch Linux with also lighweight enviroment. Or Debian, but without all suggested packages. i3, openbox, LXDE i XFCE should be suitable for it.

Powerbank supports QC 2.0 (old version probably) or QC 3.0 (which is not supported by OnePlus 7 Pro). Good choice, but not for this phone. https://forums.oneplus.com/threads/anyone-have-luck-with-pd-charging.1051302/ Dunno if I've understood it correctly, but after updates the voltages have changed in time. It says that OnePlus 7 Pro supports PD, but updates disable this function or enable it. @MarkZoid, can you borrow powebanks with different technologies and test it with Ampere app? Opinions are divided.

It depends on the way you use your operating system. What do you mean by secure? Resistant to malwares, viruses, trojans? Focused on privacy? To be honest, if you get used to use any Linux operating system, you will learn how to be safe. Even if you install secure OS, but you don't focus on your habits, for example by using weak passwords, giving all administrator's privileges to every new application, your system will not be safe as you think. You need to describe specifically this word. Distrochooser - https://distrochooser.de/en/ - you can mark the most suitable answers for you and get to know what Linux is good for you. DistroTest - https://distrotest.net/ - you can test there a lot of the most popular Linux distributions (LiveCD). For the begginner like you I would like reccomend for example Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Manjaro. They have very big support from community, but you need to decide on your own which you want to use.