Kubuntu and Vista on HP laptop

Ignore this if you are not setting up a HP laptop right now. This is only for anyone who is looking for helpful information about installing Kubuntu on a HP Compaq nx7400 notebook with Windows Vista Business (dual boot). It may be similar on other laptops and with other versions of Windows Vista though.

HP Compaq nx7400 notebook

Backup and installation

dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/media/disk/sdavista.mbr
fdisk -l /dev/sda > /media/disk/fdiskvista.log
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/disk/sda1.img
# This will take some time
dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/media/disk/sdalinux.mbr
fdisk -l /dev/sda > /media/disk/fdisklinux.log
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/disk/sda1.img
# This will take some time
dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -c > /usr/local/share/sda1.img.gz
# This will take quite some time

Restoring from backup

If Windows Vista is corrupted due to some software problem, now one does not need to have the external hard drive for restoring Windows Vista at hand. You would restore the content of the Windows Vista partition like this (I did not try this!):

gunzip -c /usr/local/share/sda1.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sda1
# This will take some time

One can use the information in fdisklinux.log using the command fdisk /dev/sda to manually restore a partition layout. The mbr-files can be used to restore a particular master-boot record. The img-file can be used to restore the 25GByte Windows Vista partition.

All this information is given without any warranty. You can send me an e-mail if you find that the information is wrong.

Note that if you uninstall the HP backup tool, it will overwrite the master-boot-record of the hard disk (without confirmation) and you will have to reinstall grub (see reference below).

Update:

Dabs is now known as BT Shop.

See also: