I want to switch...

[iSplicer]

Hey all!

I have recieved a laptop from work, that I am allowed to keep until the end of the year. It came installed with a whole lot of useless stuff, like random work logins, windows Xp programs, and it is very cluttered.

I would like to use Ubuntu linux and dual boot with my own version of windows.

I need to return the laptop in the same condition that it came in, and to do that, I need to make a perfect backup of the partition or something. I think i need to use a disk cloning device or similar..

Can someone please advise me to do so?

Thankyou!

[superprash2003]

right.. creating an image of that partition is safe.. so any problems you can restore them later.. Norton ghost is something you can give a try

[natman]

Like you said you could buy a small but cheap laptop hard disk and use that only on the laptop then after the year swap back in the old hard disk and its as if it was never touched

[Tatty]

right.. creating an image of that partition is safe.. so any problems you can restore them later.. Norton ghost is something you can give a try

There are some good FOSS alternatives too http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/backup

[PilotJLR]

Personally, I would use G4L to image it...

Having said that, if you're feeling unclear about imaging, then give a good thought whether or not you really want to do this to a company asset. Maybe I work for a too uptight company, but this would go over like a ton of bricks where I am (assuming the restore doesn't go as planned).

[iSplicer]

Thanks for the replies. I will look into more cloning solutions.

I did some research and I found an idea that I would like some advice on. Curruntly, the laptop has one big partition on the 80GB hard drive - sda1, using NTFS. If I can resize this to about 10 GB, then make a new partition and install ubuntu onto that? I will have to change the boot flag from dev/sda1 to dev/sda2... something like that, correct?