Little help: dual boot saving the information of the recovery partition

Hello, I plan to make to install xp this evening with dual boot with vista in my m1330. As I am in the process of receive another m1330 as a swap from dell (whine is annoying) I would like to restore the computer to the original state when ups comes to pick up it (so I think I will erase the xp partition the day before and restore recovery partition). I dont know if receive the computer with xp partition will bother or will not bother to "Dell", but for me does not matter to restore the recovery partition the day before.
So what I am thinking is copy all the data of the recovery partition to external hard drive, and then just copy again (after remove xp partition and making againg a recovery partition) the day before the swap to the computer. Will this work and restore the recovery partition well?

Thank you very much

P.S: do you think is a little useless return the hard drive in a good more or less "original" state, or this will not care to dell as they will probably format and install everything again?

 

I don't think it will work just to manually copy the contents of the partition. I think you need some sort of backup software like Acronis to make an image of the partition, and restore from that.

I don't think Dell will care if you leave your stuff on the hard drive. But you might get some useful experience out of experimenting with restoring the partition. If you mess up with the drive that's going back, it won't matter. Or you may be able to swap out the drive with the one in the new computer and keep your work.

 

If you do want to clear the HDD before sending it back to Dell, boot off your MediaDirect Disc and wipe out the HDD and recreate the partitions. Dell doesn't need Vista installed, so you can leave it at that. They'll just image on their own Vista image at the depot.