backup question

I'm planning on installing Ubuntu on my XP machine, mostly as a practice before doing on my Mac.

The instructions always say to back up your existing hard drive. So, as we speak I'm using Clonezilla to back up my XP 40 gb drive. Basically, it is imaging it to and external USB HDD.

I can see how this will come in very handy if something goes wrong during the Ubuntu install. But I don't see how it helps me to reinstall XP to a new smaller Win partition after I've installed Ubuntu to its own partition.

Does the reinstall of XP require a clean install of the OS and all my apps?

Or am I missing something?

You are correct that a clone of your existing XP installation cannot be brought back to a smaller version of itself. By backup here, they are suggesting that you back your documents/images/music and things that are important to you. The assumption is that should you need to restore things, you can re-install XP and bring back your files.

If you JUST want to play around with Ubuntu, perhaps installing it inside VirtualBox in XP or through WUBI might be better. Both of those options will not mess with the size of your XP installation since they will use a single file as the entire filesystem for Ubuntu..

Regards

Thanks for confirming that.

I did play around a bit with Ubuntu by running it off the install CD. Seemed to run pretty well considering it was not installed yet.

Agreed, the Live CD works quite well once fully loaded..I think that was by far that smartest thing that came to Linux since all of the distro's do it now..

Regards