Я купил новый Dell Inspiron 15. Он шел с установленной Windows 8.1. Но я хочу заменить его на Ubuntu (форматирование раздела ОС и установить Ubuntu), но боюсь потерять оригинальную копию Windows. Возможно ли восстановить окна позже в будущем из раздела восстановления или восстановления дисков.
For your Windows key, if the laptop came with Windows 8 and there is a windows logo sticker on the bottom then the windows key is stored on the motherboard. This can be retrieved with some tools.
For Windows itself, you can simply put an .iso on an usb stick and reinstall Windows from that.
So you can safely wipe the whole disk. But only if you are 100% certain that the key is baked onto the motherboard. Use this tool to retrieve the key from your Windows installation.
Yes. Just make a recovery Disk of you windows drive and after replace Windows with Ubuntu!
FYI to make a back up disk:
Control pannel > System and security > Back up your computer
If you keep your recovery partition and create any appropriate recovery discs, then you will always be able to restore your machine to its delivered state. This will lose anything else on the hard disc.
If it were me, I would shrink the W8 partition to ~50GB and give the rest of the disc over to Ubuntu to give a dual-boot system. That way I can always adjust the partition sizes if I want to start using W8 again, without losing the Ubuntu partition.
Dell devices come with a software called Dell Backup and Recovery. Run the tool, create a full backup of the HDD, store the image on a second PC and also create a recovery media to be able to restore he image later.
When you want Windows 8 back, just restore the Image.