Ubuntu Install

I decided to drop Ubuntu onto my laptop. So far, not good. It failed to resize my partition correctly and I know that Ubuntu can do that since I just helped a client do it. So, right now, I'm making an image of the HD using dd. Once that's done I'll wipe the drive and start fresh with Ubuntu...well, not exactly. I'm actually imaging all of /dev/sda so that I can completely recover if Ubuntu is no good for me (unlikely). I'll also want to image /dev/sda1 so that I can actually mount that partition using mount's loopback option. That'll give me the ability to grab my data files as needed.