[ale] Window Chopping

[Mills, John M.]

ALErs -

After last week's discussion and today's newspaper ad, I trucked over to
Fry's and tested one of their $579.00 [today anyway] laptops. Seemed to work
fine with Knoppix, so I bought one. I haven't tested the modem yet, but
touchpad, ethernet, and video all work fine. So far, so good.

I plan to install Fedora-Core3 on it. (I did 'google' on 'Great Quality' and
results came out generally OK for the desktop as to function/$; no data on
the laptops.)

Naturally it has WinXPHome installed, though I haven't booted it in Windows
yet. It does have driver and 'Product Recovery' CDs for its Windows
installation; the instructions note that the installed 'WinDVD' player is
unsupported, and I expect there is no recovery copy.

My Questions: I may wish to reinstall WinXPHome some day. What is the best
way to capture the as-yet unused installation for another system or later
installation? Should I be able to repartition my HDD back to WinXP if I need
to (presumably with the recovery CDs)? How about the MBR?

At a minimum I can use Knoppix to dump the WinXP partition's contents, but I
don't see it for piping them back.

It'ld be great to hear about well-known 'howto's and 'gotcha's before I
start swinging the axe.

TIA.
 - John Mills