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So I've got a new laptop, but no installation media. The hard drive has a hidden restore partition, a windows 7 partition, and a small partition for vendor tools.

My goal is to make a backup of the windows 7 partition, get rid of them all, install Ubuntu then reinstall windows 7 from some sort of image.

Does anyone have some help or advice on how to go about doing this, best practices, or a documented walk through?

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  • I'm interested to see if there's an answer, but personally I seriously doubt that's possible. I'm no Windows expert however.
    – Pointy
    Oct 3, 2010 at 15:06
  • Oh, also, I don't think this is really a programming question.
    – Pointy
    Oct 3, 2010 at 15:06
  • Duplicate of superuser.com/q/195386/16115
    – user16115
    Oct 3, 2010 at 20:23
  • Is this an HP laptop?
    – Moab
    Oct 4, 2010 at 2:28

3 Answers 3

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There is a backup function in Windows 7 that could help you, check it out here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/663-backup-complete-computer-create-image-backup.html

EDIT: And yeah, I guess this shoul be on https://superuser.com/

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You can use the built in backup/restore system with a installer or recovery disk

you could, alternatively use a free imaging software that runs in windows - Personally, i've had good luck with macrium reflect free.

Once that's done, i'd suggest resizing and installing, rather than removing the windows 7 partition and installing - since windows 7 will overwrite grub, and its a pain to get linux chainloaded off BCD where windows was installed after linux. You can use EasyBCD if you want the windows bootloader to chainload linux.

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I guess with the pre-installed software you would have also got some backup software too. Simply use that to create recovery disks.

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