Restore MBR on Advent Laptop

[Sickboy]

My wife has an Advent 8117 laptop with Vista Home Premium installed and a hidden recovery partition.

I'd like to install Ubuntu on it as she only browses and emails with it and recently came a cropper with some spyware she picked up with IE.

What I'd like to know is - how can I ensure that I can revert back to the original setup if she decides she can't live with Linux?

I know that, under normal circumstances, I could use the Windows recovery console and use fixmbr but that would not restore the option to use the hidden recovery partition would it?

So...

[Ol'Tunzafun]

http://quainttech.blogspot.com/2007/05/how-to-remove-ubuntu-from-vista-dual.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqvCQd3bLI

[Sickboy]

Thanks for the reply, but both links are instructions for using fixmbr.

AFAIK this would not restore the non-standard mbr which currently boots the laptop. This includes an option to use the hidden partition to restore to factory defaults.

If I created a recovery disc using the built-in program would that also restore the mbr?

[Sickboy]

Just realised I should have said that it's not my intention to dual-boot if I do install Ubuntu

[Steve R Jones]

What I'd like to know is - how can I ensure that I can revert back to the original setup if she decides she can't live with Linux?

Buy another hard drive;)

[Rocketmech]

The created Recovery disks should restore the hard drive to original factory conditions. You should confirm that with Advent, but most OEM recovery's do restore the drive image.