Laptop install: Preserve recovery partition

[xboxboy]

Hi all. I have a dell xps13 developer edition with ubuntu factory installed. It works well. But it's time for some Mageia magic. I've run a live magiea off of a usb and everything seems fine.

Now, I'd like to install Mageia, but I'd like to preserve the factory recovery partition incase it ever needs to be reverted to Ubuntu (eg for selling, warranty etc).

So, this is what I've found:

Code: Select all

NAME   FSTYPE   SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL
sda           119.2G           
├─sda1 vfat     350M            DELLUTILITY
├─sda2 vfat       3G            OS
├─sda3 ext4   100.9G /         
├─sda4            1K           
└─sda5 swap    15.1G [SWAP]     


So this is my understanding of it:
sda1, dell recovery utility
sda2, recovery image
sda3, the / of the factory install
sda4, I have no idea
sda5, swap

So can I install mageia simply to sda3 and point sda5 to swap? And if needed in the future, I can invoke the recovery utility to reinstall ubuntu?

[doktor5000]

Easiest is probably to simply do an image of the complete drive before. You should also check for some hidden partitions via fdisk or something the like.

But in general, your approach should be OK. FWIW, sda4 is probably just the extended partition holding sda5.

[xboxboy]

Thanks doc. What is the best way to image the drive? Simply dd sda1, sda2 etc. Or is there a way to copy SDA without including all the free space?

[doktor5000]

partimage or clonezilla should be able to do that. There are other weird ways which involve writing zeros to free space and then using sparse files ...
Check e.g. http://serverfault.com/questions/93667/ ... pace-linux