Understanding the Recovery Partition / Usage

Hi All,

I have an Aspire 3002LC, 40GB HDD, stock standard XP home install.

Am looking at dual booting XP with Linux. Later will get a larger HDD but putting that off as reinstalling XP for me means a day of reconfig all my development tools and other software... May just ghost that or whatever...

My actual questions are to confirm my understanding of the recovery partition.

Here is what I think is correct.

The recovery partition is a ghost image of the original XP install. Creating recovery cds is just a copy of the recovery image. Running restore via alt f10 at boot is the quickest method of restore. Having recovery cds means recovery partition is not necessary.
I have the original system + 3 cds from which I could reinstall from if I needed to anyway.

All recovery / reinstall options blow away all other installed software.

I haven't made recovery cds as if I do need to reinstall, I will use my copy of XPPro and use the system cds or d/l from acer any drivers etc.

Am I correct?

If all above is correct, I will blow away the recovery partition, enlarge C: partition to grab data off D:, remove D: and create ext3, swap etc before I install Linux.

Confirmation / corrections gladly welcomed,

Bryan

 

If you have a clean copy of XP then simply download ALL drivers and apps provided by ACER be sure though you have *everything* you need then back these up twice for safety that inlcudes other OS drivers you might use in the future. Thye'll fit happily on a single CD (or 2 identical CD's to backup the backup).

I would then install each driver one at a time on the working machine just to be 100% they all work fine.

Then blast that 40BG into a nice 7-15GB for the C: drive depending on your requirements and some GB for the D: drive [ok smarties i know it aint gonna be called the D: drive but you get the picture] (depends on with flavour of NIX you're gonna use).

Leaving a FAT32 partition of the whatever is left space as a storage location which can be read by both XP and NIX*

 

thx mrsmitconh,

thats pretty much what I plan.

I take it that I am correct re the recovery partition?

Bryan