Can I backup my drive, and restore it to a partition?

[dmetzcher]

I have a single partition on my iBook running Tiger. I use SuperDuper to back up (clone) the drive once a week, or more. What I want to do is run a backup, re-partition the drive so that there are three partitions, and then restore my existing clone of the original single partition onto the first partition in the new 3-partition scheme. So, one partition becomes three, and OS X gets restored to the first partition.

The reason for this is that I want to install Ubuntu Linux on one of the other partitions, and leave the third partition alone as a shared area of the disk.

The problem is that I'm seeing all the "Dual Boot Ubuntu and Mac OS X" advice saying that one should do a fresh install of Tiger on the first partition. I'm not seeing anyone saying that restoring from a clone is impossible, or should not be done, but I'm not seeing anyone say it can be the method used, either.

Three questions:
1. Is a fresh install necessary, or can I restore my clone to one of the new partitions?

2. My clone is on a sparse disk image. When I do the restore, how should I do it? I am assuming Disk Utility's "Restore" tab will do the trick, but I have never used it. Is this the route I should go to do the restore?

3. Assuming that I restore, I am also assuming that I will first have to install Mac OS X on the first partition, and then boot into it, launch Disk Utility, and run the restore from there. Or, can I use Disk Utility from the Tiger install DVD to get the restore going? That would save me a step (the initial install, which would only be overwritten by the restore, anyway).

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

[jbarley]

Dennis,
I use Super-Duper daily for all my backups, (scheduled and manual) and other disk manipulation tasks.

I have a firewire drive with a bootable system on it, I also save my clone images to this firewire drive.
I have in the past on several occasions, done exactly what you are asking.(made a fresh clone, - repartitioned my drive - and restored the clone to one of the new partitions.
BUT, I did this by booting from my firewire drive and running Super-Duper to do the restore.
For my own edification, I have tested and found that OS X's Disk Utility from the OS X boot CD will successfully restore a Super-Duper cloned image.
I did this test as a "just in case all else fails" type of senerio, normally I would use Super-Duper.
Whatever you decide to try, make sure you have some type of a workable "Plan B".
One major point, your idea of installing a fresh OS X system and then restoring your clone over top of it, will not work, as you can't restore to the drive you are currenly running from.
The idea of Booting from the CD and using Disk Utility to restore sounds like the method you'll need, unless like myself, you have another bootable drive.

jb.

[dmetzcher]

Excellent. Thanks, jbarley, so much for the thorough response. It looks like this should be easy...well, OS X will be easy. I've never install Ubuntu on an iBook, though it looks like a ton of others have done so, from what I'm reading. "Ubuntu Mac OS X iBook" yields a lot of results from Google, so, at least I'll have a few other users who have done this (Ubuntu dual boot with OS X), if I run into Ubuntu-specific nightmares. If all else fails...I'll just re-install OS X fresh, ditch Ubuntu, give up on it, and manually move everything back from my clone.

I'll monitor this thread until later tonight, when I plan to do all this. If anyone else has a helpful tip or two, please post it.

Thanks!