Just load them with openwrt and enjoy

Don’t three rights make a left?

woosh

Both my partner and I use “dude” interchangeably for all genders. They’re NB for context

Ok so, replacing the head unit might work?

Is there anything a mildly competent electronics enthusiast could do to disable any outbound data?

Certainly! I’m not sure when I’ll get around to actually doing it, but my intent was to create an emergency boot drive to send to my elderly family members that they could plug in if the system ever started acting up, and I’ll build it in such a way that it’ll be able to be booted as a Linux live USB, and also have a Windows partition for any tools that I might need for remote access and in-system diagnostics.

I’ve built a few scripts for the Linux bootable but I can’t seem to remember where I stored that particular repo at the moment, so I’ll share later.

Some of my stuff is up on my GitHub (same username)

Thanks a ton for all the advice! 👍🏼

This sounds like a perfectly workable solution!

I assume getting a persistent environment in a USB recovery stick is a bigger task? I’m imagining that, with your method, I would need to repeat this process any time I wanted to update the image or load specific new kernel modules/drivers?

Customizing a base distro sounds like a good place to start 👍🏽

Hijacking for my own idea: what if I wanted to make my own updated version of say, hiren’s Linux environment that included tools for data recovery and drive administration among other things. I would love to basically build my own custom recovery environment preloaded with all my favorite tools.

Tbf, with a few hours of googling, I could probably figure this out for myself so don’t go through a bunch of trouble unless you want to document for others. I’m mainly posting because I saw OP and wondered if something easy already existed?

The dad jokes are strong with this one