I am about to loan a less-used machine, temporarily, for a project to "prove
something in Linux". That project is none of my business but I have created
an Acronis image on optical media so I can restore the original WinXP Pro
OS, after I receive the machine back this weekend.

Can anybody tell me if I might to format the system drive first before doing
the image restore? Or can I let my Acronis boot-disc do its job straight
away? I do not even know if Acronis can even *see* a drive formatted with a
Linux file system to restore to. I use Acronis Version 8.

I am asking this out of academic curiosity. I can always hook the system
drive to my USB2 cable (long) and plug it into my own machine and create a
new NTFS volume plus format. I suddenly realized that I know zilch about
non-Windows file systems!

Regards and thanks a lot in anticipation.

JP