Take backup on Windows 10, and nothing else?

drond said:

I want to make a backup of Windows 10 Home (and nothing else, just the operating system) to an external device of any kind... I do not want to discard my Windows 10 license, I want the ability to reinstall Windows 10 when I want to...

Welcome to TenForums @drond

Your machine has a digital licence for Windows 10 Home stored on Microsoft's activation servers linked to the hardware ID of the PC. You can clean install Home and skip providing a key if asked. It will activate automatically as soon as it can contact the activation servers.

If you want the ability to restore the system as it is currently configured, including your installed apps, the look at imaging the system to an external HDD using Macrium Reflect (free).

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect

drond said:

Hello World

I want to make a backup of Windows 10 Home (and nothing else, just the operating system) to an external device of any kind. The idea is that I want to try installing Ubuntu (Linux) on my computer. Dual Boot is no solution. As I want, I want to have full power over the hard drive, I want to format, partition and play around without having to take into account any recovery partition or similar to the computer. However, I do not want to discard my Windows 10 license, I want the ability to reinstall Windows 10 when I want to.

What's the smartest way to go?
The computer is a Asus laptop without dvd-drive, more specifications are probably unnecessary as I think this is a software-based task.

How should I do when I want to reinstall Windows 10?

Hi

Image the HDD (not clone it) to external device - suggest Macrium. Create the bootable restore program and then when you need Windows again simply boot the restore program and restore the image.

I have possibly a better solution for you -- why not first try Ubuntu as a Virtual Machine -- as you have Home edition you can't use HYPER-V but VBOX or VMWARE VPLAYER (both free) should be fine for cxreating your Virtual machine.

Then you don't need to dual boot - run both UBUNTU and Windows concurrentrly.

You only need to install Ubuntu as a physical machine if you really need to use the physical hardware.

For learning Linux / get more experience a VM IMO is absolutely the way to go -- also if you get it all hosed up just delete the VM and create another one !!. I think in any case unless you really need to use the physical hardware dual booting isn't normally the way to go any more.

(Of course specific people have different needs and may want to try out stuff on dedicated hardware - but for most people who just want / need to learn / use Linux without going too deeply into writing hardware drivers etc then a VM is an ideal method to use).

Note also on a Linux VM you can use dedicated HDD's (add as RAW format) to the VM so you can partition etc the HDD's in native Linux File systems if you want.

It's IMO the best way of starting yto learn a new OS -- and once you get more experience then you can mess around with a physical installation.

Cheers
jimbo