Help Backup New Laptop

Hi all, and thanks for reading, it's kind of a long post.

I turned 17, and got a new acer Aspire 9410-4872 as a birthday present. It comes with Windows Vista pre-installed in it, which I don't like at all, and doesn't bring any cd or dvd copy of the operating system.

The hard disk has three main partitions:

1) 50 Gb, Windows Vista - fat 32
2) 50 Gb, Free partition - fat 32
3) 10 Gb, Hidden Partition - ???

I know the hidden partition is the one that holds the image for the op.sys. restore.
What I want to do is to get rid of vista and all partitions in the hard disk, install a few linux distros I use (ubuntu, open suse and zenwalk) and a small windows xp for school compatibility. To keep the warranty in case something happens, I need to be able to return the computer to its original state. For this reason is that I was thinking on:

1) Make a backup of the mbr and the partition table with dd and sfdisk/cfdisk.
2) Use the free partition to make images of the Hidden and Vista partitions with ghost or acronis ti (if compressed even better, high school guy salary ), and then save them to dvds.
3) Make an acronis boot cd, so I can restore the images.

The questions are: Will ati or ghost be able to restore the image of the hidden partition? Is there any how-to or guide about how to perform this procces?

Any advice is more than welcome!! Oh, the machine is in factory state, I haven't done anything with it... yet!!
Thanks!
Frc

 

hi frc,
and welcome to the forum.

having installed ubuntu 6.10 recently on my acer 2303:-

i made the error of installing ubuntu in auto mode so the 'grub' bootloader messed up the acer mbr; since uninstalling ubuntu, win xp still boots but acer's keyboard method of restoring from the hidden partition ie alt + f10 to access the hidden partition, there is a long thread discussing the Alt F10 in the acer section,

I would advise it essential to back up the mbr and partition table; also back up the vista partition and hidden partion with ghost or acronis. It may also pay to make a ghost image of the complete drive as is current,this i also give you a second backup of the mbr and partition table.

*Though time consuming i would strongly recommend doing two backups of all the above.*

thanks

 

Macwinux, thanks for your reply and welcome, both are very much appreciated.

I followed your advice, and made 3 sets of backups. The first one with the erecovery tool and second one with acronis. The third one, though more complicated and time consuming, is the one I trust the most. I can confirm this now, when after wiping the machine could restore it to factory condition without problems.

In case it might be useful to someone else, basically what I did was:

1) Make a SLAX boot cd with all the utilities (gparted, ntfs,wireless drivers,etc)
2) Boot it, made copies of mbr and partition table with dd and sfdisk, save in data partition.
3) Made backup of vista and hidden partitions with dd/gunzip-9, save in data partition (long process).
4) Burn all data info to DVDs.

frc

 

great stuff frc, well done!