[ale] Window Chopping

[Keith R. Watson]

At 13:12 5/13/2005, you wrote:
>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
>
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>Ale at ale.org
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John,

Ghost is the simplest way. It's possible to make a bootable CD/DVD that 
would restore the factory configuration. There may be an open source 
solution that will work but I haven't tried them.

keith

-- 

Keith R. Watson                        GTRI/ISD
Systems Support Specialist III         Georgia Tech Research Institute
keith.watson at gtri.gatech.edu           Atlanta, GA  30332-0816
404-894-0836