Making a default settings disc - necessary or not? (And if so - how?)

[mccrayon]

Hi,
I've been googling this and just can't find an answer, so I'm now new to the board and am hoping I might find somethign out regarding this.

Basically, I'm absolutely brand new to Linux, never used it before, but am (very) slowly beginning to figure things out about.
I've got an HP netbook, which runs on Linux - Suse. It was bought in Currys, where I was told to make a factory settings back up (on at least a 4gb USB memory stick, seeing as the netbook doesn't have a disc drive to make it on DVD).

I was told that if anything goes wrong with the netbook, the first thing you would do (as with any laptop/pc) is restore it back to factory settings using the dvd/usb you saved your factory settings to.
Also, I was told about someone who bought an Acer netbook and certain things on it weren't working anymore, so he took it back to the store it was bought from, they phoned Acer as it was still within it's manufacturer's guarantee, but because the customer hadn't made a factory settings disc, they wouldn't help him. (Apparently some manufacturer's will help, but they will charge a minimum of £25 to make a factory settings disc and restore it).

Now upon hearing this, I thought it would be worthwhile to create this factory settings disc, bought the 4gb usb stick and waited for the request to make a factory settings back up to appear when installing and setting it all up for the first time - like I was told would happen in store - however, nothing like that happened, and when I search the netbook for an option to do this, I can't find anything.

I was just wondering if it is in fact necessary to make the factory settings back up or not, and if so, how do you do it?
I phoned HP and asked them, but I don't think I was getting my point across very clearly - first of all they were going to tell me how to actually restore my netbook, which I didn't want, and then they were telling me how to back up normal data, and not the entire system.

Sorry this was long winded, but many thanks to anyone who can help!

[i92guboj]

I was told that if anything goes wrong with the netbook, the first thing you would do (as with any laptop/pc) is restore it back to factory settings using the dvd/usb you saved your factory settings to.
Also, I was told about someone who bought an Acer netbook and certain things on it weren't working anymore, so he took it back to the store it was bought from, they phoned Acer as it was still within it's manufacturer's guarantee, but because the customer hadn't made a factory settings disc, they wouldn't help him. (Apparently some manufacturer's will help, but they will charge a minimum of £25 to make a factory settings disc and restore it).

On any country where the guarantees are regulated by law, this would be completely illegal. It's they who have to provide the tech support, and not you. I'd just complain to them and use whatever legal power I have at my disponsal to make them comply with their own contract. Not all countries are the same. Here there are associations of consumer which are a good way to make pressure over big companies which know that their customers can't stand on a trial against them, mainly because of the huge difference in economic resources and because, to tell the truth, judges have no idea about most of this stuff. Though that's changing fortunately.

Now upon hearing this, I thought it would be worthwhile to create this factory settings disc, bought the 4gb usb stick and waited for the request to make a factory settings back up to appear when installing and setting it all up for the first time - like I was told would happen in store - however, nothing like that happened, and when I search the netbook for an option to do this, I can't find anything.

You can make a full backup of the disk by doing a disk image with dd. But, of course, you need to have some place to store the result. You might want to zero out the empty parts of the disk first so the image can be compressed with bigger success.

You can do both things (the zero part and the backup) using dd, you only need some basic understanding on how linux name the disks, host to mount them, etc.

To zero the empty parts of the disk, you can use this:

dd if=/dev/zero of=tmp_file

It will exit when there's no more space available. Then just do "rm tmp_file", the unallocated portion of the disk will contain only zeros.

To make the actual disk image you need to boot from a livecd, just to make sure that no partition is mounted (if the contents change while you are dd'ing the image will be corrupted). Then you need to mount a disk where you will save the image (no need to say it has to be big enough).

dd if=/dev/origin_disk of=/mnt/my_big_disk/backup_file.img

You need to adjust the paths of course, after that you can use bzip2 or gzip to compress the image file to save some space.

To restore it you just change if and of on the command above.

dd of=/dev/origin_disk if=/mnt/my_big_disk/backup_file.img

However note that you should be really careful when using dd. If you use the correct of= you can overwrite the wrong partition and trash all your data. Playing with partition is never 100% risk free.

[mccrayon]

Thanks very much for all the info you gave me - it's a great help!