Preserving Win 7 install

[Guest]

Hi

I've got a Dell Inspiron with pre-loaded Win 7 but no installation media provided. The system has two hidden partions; one for the Dell utilities for which I do have the installation media, one which is the factory reset partion. The main partion is the installed Win 7 system. I haven't added anything to the Win 7 system yet, so it's as the machine was delivered.

Before I blow everything away, I want to somehow preserve my Win 7 in a form that I can re-load into a virtual machine and retain my licensed Win 7.

I do not want to have a dual boot system.

Is this possible, and if so, how?

Regards

[dibl]

Re: Preserving Win 7 install

The best answer, IMHO, is clonezilla. I did the exact same maneuver to a new netbook, with Win XP, about a year and a half ago.

Clonezilla is admittedly not the world's most user-friendly software, but I'm no rocket scientist and it took me maybe 45 minutes to figure it out. Just google for "clonezilla how-to" or something like that.

You'll need a hard drive or partition where you can save the images that clonezilla will make. I would image each of your three partitions, and once that is complete, use fdisk -lu to get the exact layout of your existing hard drive, and record that, so if you ever need to reconfigure it back to the original layout (sectors and partitions) you can do that. Once that is done, I would use GParted and change it to 2 or 3 partitions as you wish, for your Linux system. Personally, I would do:

20GB for the complete OS
2GB for swap (unlikely to be needed on a laptop unless you're encoding videos there)
the rest of it for user data

Good luck!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Preserving Win 7 install

Look up how to install Kubuntu using wubi.exe.
It installs Kubuntu as a file on Win7 and adds it to Win's boot menu.

You can remove it using the control panel.

When chosen from the boot menu Kubuntu runs the the computer just as if it was booted from it's own partition.

[GilGib]

Re: Preserving Win 7 install

After doing a backup using Clonezilla you can convert your win7 partition to VirtualBox or Vmware File. I did this with a Live XP partition now I run it under virtualbox .
Do a google search on converting a Live Win7 to Virtualbox