Re: backing up a new laptop
On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 15:18:14 -0400
hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> My son just got himself a Lenovo thinkpad with wifi, ethernet, a
> tablet, and Windows XP. For reasons I will not go into here, he
> wants to make sure his Windows XP system remains functional even
> though he prefers Linux, and plans to dual-boot between Windows and
> Gentoo. (I'm the debian user, and this is of concern to me, so it's
> not *totally* off-topic on Debian-user).
>
> There is no CD drive on this system (reduces the weight), but it
> will boot from USB drives.
>
> He should be able to connect to my LAN, which has large
> NFS-accessible storage.
>
> What he wants to do is make a complete backup of his hard disk
> (possibly partition by partition) before he does anything to install
> any linux, makes any real use of windows, and especially before he
> connects to the net using Windows. He's not stupid. There is a
> Windows rescue partition on the disk, but we're not naive enough to
> believe that it will be unaffected by real trouble either.
>
> My question is: what recommendations do you have as to appropriate
> tools for this? Presumably some kind of Linux live CD, but what
> flavour, and what software from the live CD. We also have to be
> able to restore from this backup when the entire machine is hosed, of
> course.
>
> If necessary, I can disconnect the entire LAN from the wider net
> while we make this backup.
>
> There is 45G of free space on the hard disk, and the hard drive is
> said to be 60G, whatever that means. This suggests there is of the
> order of 15G if actual information, split bwtween Windows and the
> rescue partition.
I am not sure what the significance is of a rescue partition. What i
have found on the 3 laptops I bought, one could do a fresh install,
repartitioning and creating a second partition.One just had image
restore disks that could only restore to the original equipment,
original configuration So it depends on what restore media you get.
My best scenario was an oem like restore disk , you can do fresh
installs if you want. I used 'ntfsresize' to shrink the Windows
partition to 6 gb. I then had ~14 gb to install Linux. Partimage is a
good program to image a partition, the fewer partions the easier it
is :-)
HTH
--
Greg Madden
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