Iris

Iris is a Sharp PC-M4000 laptop

She came with XP Pro installed.

I am using Linux to create a backup image before installing Ubuntu. I booted from the Ubuntu 6.06 cdrom and will use the dd command to create images of the drive partitions.

It has 4 partitions.

1    1 7649 07  NTFS            61 GB  Drive C:
2 7650 9091 0f  W95             11 GB  Drive D:
3 9092 9729 de  "Dell Utility"  1/2 GB
-
5 7650 9091 07  NTFS            Drive D: by another name

I presume that the third partition is the recovery partition... No need to back up sda2 as it is completely empty. This creates compressed images of the complete partition. Every bit is backed up.

dd if=/dev/sda1 | ssh -l root bread zip /home/backups/iris_sda1 - 
dd if=/dev/sda3 | ssh -l root bread zip /home/backups/iris_sda3 -

Clumsy but should make it possible to bring the machine back to its original state. I should be able to safely remove the recovery partition. To be on the safe side I will also burn the recovery partition to a CD.