[opensuse] Question for the hard-disk management experts

Hi all. I'm messing around with my Dad's laptop computer - an Acer Extensta 5210 with an 80GB HDD, 1.5GB RAM and Windows 7 (yuk!). Windows 7 runs like treacle on this thing for some reason, and he has another (newer) Windows laptop anyway, so I'm installing oS 11.4 on it for him. The thing is that I want to dump the Windows partition and the Acer recovery partition to a portable drive so that I have a way back if he decides he wants to go back to Windows (which I don't think he will - his desktop machine runs oS 10.3 and he's been using that for ages, although only occassionally - it runs a local IMAP server for him so he can get the same mail on both laptops). Anyway, I've dumped the Windows partition (now 43GB) and the recovery partition (10GB, near enough) with dd if=/dev/sda<1,2> of= to a terabyte USB drive, but my question is this. Should I backup the partition table from the original drive as well, to ease the process of restoring it back to its current state before I completely blow away these 2 partitions of the HDD in the laptop? What is the correct way to do this, apart from pen and paper? Assuming I do back it up to the USB drive, what would the process be to restore it? Sorry for the long'ish explanation, but context is sometimes useful. TIA, Rodney. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au =================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org