Restore from Dual Boot

[DNash9]

I am in the process of dual booting my Windows 7 PC to run Ubuntu and Windows 7, but I must admit that I am worried that something may go wrong, and I would like a backup plan. After partitioning the drive and dual booting, will it still be possible to restore my PC to factory settings as I have done in the past without a disk?

[oz]

Hello and welcome to the forums!

While I no longer dual-boot, I used to do so and never had any problems restoring my Windows or Linux systems by using imaging utilities such as Clonezilla (native Linux app), or TrueImage (native Windows app). It generally takes me about 3 to 5 minutes to create the system image, or about 2 to 3 minutes to totally restore the system from those images. I prefer running either utility from a liveCD environment.

You can also use a utility such as FSArchiver (native Linux app) to create a system archive that can be easily restored, although you might have to restore your bootloader through a separate process. The completed operation times are about the same as the previous options, and I usually run it from a liveCD such as the PartedMagic liveCD.

Good luck with all of it, and we hope you'll enjoy running Linux!

[eionmac]

Strongly suggest you do back up toat least two media, say external hard disc on USB and a set of CDs or DVDs and have Live Linux distro with the rerstore program on it.

[jonyo]

Strongly suggest you do back up toat least two media

and at least 2 separate backups

prop best and easiest to copy/clone your HD to another, in win with free available and easy software, then use the new HD to mess with, then if you wreck it, you can just start fresh again without having any effect on the first original HD, as it won't be connected when you mess with the new full hd backup

if you don't already have at least a full backup on another drive, then you don't really even have a solid backup now,

or at least i don't consider everything on one drive, anything more than a secondary backup setup, at best

After partitioning the drive and dual booting, will it still be possible to restore my PC to factory settings as I have done in the past without a disk?

you would prob have to find out with your new setup, prob too many unknown variables to give you a solid answer, diff COs go about their restore stuff in diff ways

they're setup to restore without considerations of what adding linux to the setup might do

a backup setup even with just 2 drives isn't a backup plan,

if they are both run off a single power supply at the same time, they can both blow, by a power supply that acts up, or other things

[oz]

You can find some backup and recovery application options here:

Backup & Recovery | Linux App Finder

If you should see something there that you want to try, I'd recommend looking for the package in your distribution repositories rather than installing from source.

Have fun with Linux!

[twoHats]

Most Windows setups have a recovery partition and a windows partition, and after setting up dual boot some other partitions. After doing a backup, if you want to get back to just Win 7 - try just running the win 7 recovery and it should put things back like they were...

[jonyo]

if your 'pute has some spare juice, running Ubu in vmware is an option that doesn't mess with factory win setups,

might have a look at wubi also,

often there is an option to make backup cd/dvd(s) to restore an original setup, witch usually comes with alot of the included garbage,

you should also have a valid key, then have the option to do a standard install with a plain & appropriate disk