Will Rescue DVD's repartition the hard drive?

[nyssad]

The motherboard on my old IBM Thinkpad T30 died a few weeks ago. I was running dual boot XP and Ubuntu. I purchased an Ideapad Z560 with Win 7 Home. Much to my surprise the hard drive had been partitioned and the drivers had been placed on the D drive. I resized the the C drive and installed Ubuntu 10.10. This really slowed things down on Win 7 so I merged the 30 gigs I had given to Linux to the D drive and intended on installing Ubuntu after the D drive. The problem is that Ubuntu does not recognize the partitions so I can't tell it where to install. From reading the postings, it looks like partitioning the hard drive makes one key recovery useless. I did make recovery DVD's when I got the machine. If I use the DVDs will it resize my partitions back to the original? Also, If I move the drivers to the C drive, will it still function and where do I put them? I would like to use the 30 gig d drive for the Ubuntu if possible. I am new to windows 7.

The main question is: Will using the DVD system recovery discs repartition my hard drive back to the original setup?

[Kris237]

if you add a reiserfs or whatever partition to the mbr, yes, one key probably will not work as you hope.

Ubuntu should recognize the fat32 or ntfs partitions.  if not you may need to grab a live cd like minislax and manually create a partition for your Linux. You will then probably need GRUB to boot it.  Beware mucking with a mbr pointing to a Vista or Win7 boot partition.

I use macrium reflect  (free) to back up the spindle, while I don't use Linux, that should work fine with that as well, and you can manually rebuild your spindle if a bearing blows, or just restore the partition of choice from that image..

There is a super something (key, folder, pointer, partition, ?) in Linux that needs to be restored correctly when restoring a Linux partition.  I have no idea if Macrium reflect will do this.  taint simple.  should be.

I guarantee nothing, which is one reason I avoid Linux.