Creating a RnR service partition

[drixoman]

Hi, This is part of an ongoing personal project of my to configure my T500 from scratch. I'm planning to dual boot Kubuntu (using grub as bootloader) but can't decide how to do it...(I need to admit here that I'm not linux litereate at all...)

I used dban and scrapped my vista in favour of xp, i figured since I hate vista I didn't bother to make a recovery set...
but I'm just wondering about RnR (4.2)...
1. Does RnR backup and recover on a partition bases or does it only back up what Windows can see?
1a. I don't know how it recover stuff since I don't have a usb hdd big enough to test the whole process myself...but does it wipe out everything and replace the hdd with the backup or does it just rebuild the specific parition it backed up without disturbing the partition structure or something?
2. I figured it's good practice to install the predesktop area on a separate partition, however the predesktop file always end up installed onto the same partition as Windows...Is there anyway to installed the predesktop to a specified destination or something?
so basically What I am aiming for here is 5 partition: RnR, a bootloader partition, Windows, linux, and swap(don't know why I need that but it was suggested by the installer)

Thanks.