Tips For Taking Your Laptop Into and Out of the US?

casualsax3 writes "I'm going to be taking a week long round trip from NYC to Puerto Vallarta Mexico sometime next month, and I was planning on taking my laptop with me. I'll probably want to rip a few movies and albums to the drive in order to keep busy on the flight. More important though, is that I'm also going to be taking pictures while I'm there, and storing them on the laptop. With everything in the news, I'm concerned that I'll have to show someone around the internals of my laptop coming back into the US. The pictures are potentially what upsets me the most, as I feel it's an incredible violation of my privacy. Do I actually need to worry about this? If so, should I go about hiding everything? I've heard good things about Truecrypt. Is it worth looking into or am I being overly paranoid?"

Comments

Re:Boot to BSoD

[jbeaupre]

Or have it "crash" on boot and you'll be sent along your way with a sympathetic shrug.

Re:If you're that worried...

[The Faywood Assassin]

Actually its even easier than that.

If you can, set the BIOS to set the CF or SD card slot as the first boot device, and the hard drive as the second.

Thus, without a card in the slot during boot up, you get a normal Windows session, with the card in you get a Linux session.

Also, if the Linux session does not auto mount the windows disk, then the simpleton inspecting your computer will never see your files on the hard drive.

Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux are perfect for this

Beny