How to save my certified Ubuntu 11.10 which came with the computer

Question

I have bought a computer with Ubuntu 11.10 and now I need to install Windows XP alonside it. Is it possible to save my certified Ubuntu configuration onto a usb stick, then unistall Ubuntu, install Windows and reinstall Ubuntu? If so, can you tell me, how to do it? Thanks for any hints without using complicated terminology.

Answer 1

As your Ubuntu root Partition may be ext4, you should use fsarchiver.

It's a great commande line tool that will save and compress the content of a partition into an archive file.

When you are done you will be able to restore your archive in a new partition with different size without problem.

I advise you to use it from a liveCD although liveBackup is possible

Answer 2

View months ago, i used DAR to backup my whole Linux partion. Here is the tutorial site and here a Mini-HowTo. After the dar file is created you can save it on a USB-Dongle/HDD.

You can install the DAR package with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dar