X-Post to uk.d-i-y because of the general knowledge there :-)
I feel the need to take an image backup of my Vista partition prior to tinkering. It is a long time since I did this. Computer is a Dell XPS M1530 laptop. Disc has already been through the wars with a corrupt partition table which was finally recovered.
So - firstly the disc layout is as follows taken from Disk Management:
133MB FAT (no label) Primary - no idea what this is for - Linux boot partition? 15GB NTFS (Recovery) Primary - 8.95GB free - presumably copy of the OS install media? 196.45GB (OS (C:)) System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition- 30.52GB free - Vista 9.5GB (no label) Primary - Linux Swap 74.5 GB (no label) Primary - Linux 2.5GB FAT32 (mediaDirect) Logical - Media Direct application/OS to allow PC to boot up into media server directly.Now there seem to be too many Primary partitions but this could just be a limitation of Disk Manager under Vista. I would need to fire up Linux to check what it looks like from that OS.
I'm not bothered about securing the Linux bits as I use them rarely on this PC. I am certainly not bothered about the MediaDirect partition which doesn't seem compatible with Linux dual boot - when I tried to reinstall MediaDirect (complete with link to special button on keyboard) this trashed my partition table and I was lucky to get it back.
Presumably to enable me to recover to this disk (or another) I need to back up the first three partitions. Also presumably I can't do this with Vista running.
So what is the best (preferably free) tool to use for this? Can boot from CD or run from Linux (Ubuntu). Also, can this save the images in a filestore file or do I have to have a disc with unformatted space to copy the partition byte for byte? Oh, and if the FAT partition is Linux boot, can I mount it under Windows by assigning it a drive letter? I assume there is something marking it not to be mounted by Windows?
Any advice gratefully accepted.
Cheers
Dave R