[ltp] how to protect rescue partition before/when dualbooting?

[Tom Roche]

summary: W510 shipped with Vista, vendor upgraded to W7, to be dualbooted. How to preserve the rescue partition, or at least its functionality, JIC something goes wrong?

details:

I'm currently evaluating a TP W510 (product ID=4389UN5) which my
school has on closeout. It shipped with Vista which the school
upgraded to W7 Enterprise. I will probably have occasional use for W7,
but mostly want this box to run linux (specifically LMDE, a debian
variant). That will require repartitioning, which makes me anxious to
preserve the hidden partition that Rescue and Recovery uses, and which
(IIRC) contains startup ThinkVantage utilities. (When repartitioning I
will attempt to keep partition=diags, but there are numerous reports
online of folks trying and failing to do this.) Hence I mostly wanted
to create the Product Recovery DVD per ThinkWiki

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Pre-Installation_steps#Rescue_and_Recovery_Media

prior to installing linux. Like the OP on this thread

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkVantage-Technologies/I-updated-my-T61-from-VISTA-to-win-7-64-bit-now-thinpad-recovery/td-p/597059

I also was unable to install R&R 4.5, but was able to install R&R
4.31. I then ran ThinkVantage System Update, which applied fixes to
R&R but did not up-version it. After defrag, etc, I ran R&R and hit
button="Launch advanced Rescue and Recovery", but only saw an option
(besides the ones for creating/restoring system backups) to
"Create Rescue Media", which only creates the first recovery CD (but
doesn't backup the utilities to DVD).

How to backup or otherwise preserve the utilities in the hidden
partition, or the hidden partition itself? Other than clonezilla-ing
the current HD (which I am imaging now)--I would prefer a more
flexible response to future problems.

TIA, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche@pobox.com>