How does recovery disc work?

Hi, apologies if this is covered elsewhere but from the search I did I couldn't find anything.

I have a 120Gb hard drive Aspire One running Linpus. I'm interested in experimenting with other operating systems (XP and Ubuntu), but whilst I have installed XP on other PC's in the past I'm still fairly new to this sort of thing, and more than a bit nervous!

Before I start messing around I'd like to understand how the recovery disc works, and specifically will it repartition and reformat the disc if I have messed around with partitions and formatting myself? Basically, will it be able to restore the to the original out-of-the-box state with linpus no matter what I've done to the disc, or does it rely on the partitions and formatting being okay? By the way, I have a USB DVD drive, so i don't need to concern myself with recovery USB sticks.

If anyone knows exactly how the recovery disc works then I'd be grateful for the information!

 

Nobody? Oh well, I think I can now answer the question myself...

It appears that the restore process just copies an image file onto the disk, since I have now done the things that were worrying me (re-partitioned, change one partition's format to NTFS, etc...) and restored to the original out-of-the-box situation using the restore disc.

Interestingly, I also called Acer's technical support here in the UK, and they were quite vague about how it worked...

 

One thing that panicked me, once I realised, is that the first (default) option to install Linpus to the HDD, has a timer on it - after 10 seconds, it seems to start installing to the HDD automagically.

This wasn't good, as I was trying to copy the image to a USB stick, and did so first on my gf's Macbook, and then on my Media Center. Luckily it hung at the beginning both times (hopefully it intentionally identified non-Acer hardware, rather than being through luck).


Anyway - once I moved the cursor to Option 2 (install to USB stick), it seems to be creating the USB stick OK, to my Sandisk Cruzer. Another point to note is that you need a USB mouse to run the USB setup program - it's pointer-driven, and there didn't seem to be a way to drive it from the keyboard (unless the Macbook's keyboard was unsupported, as well as the trackpad). That created OK, and I then booted the AAO off it. 25-30 minutes later, I have a box-fresh AAO up and running.

What would be useful for me now, is to save an image of the USB stick so I don't have to go through the prospect of accidentally reimaging my main home server with Linpus once again. I'm just trying USB Image Tool, and will see if that works.


D