Vista on an XP machine

Good day everyone,

When I purchased my Dimension 9200 from Dell, Vista was just about to be released. I ended up getting XP on my system and a free Vista upgrade disk. I want to install Vista on the PC but I also want to keep the XP recovery partition in the event I want to go back to XP. If I install Vista on the system it would most ceratinly remove this partition. So...

Is there a way to copy/backup the entire drive - including the XP recovery partition? I am hoping it is possible to use Ghost or another imaging software to make a complete image of the entire physical drive with the recovery partition as it would certainly save time if I wanted to go back to my previous setup.

If is not possible to do this, would the next best thing be to save all data, restore to factory, apply all OS and hardware updates, remove all trialware I don't want and then make an image of the drive for restore that way?

One final question... Has anyone gone from XP to Vista and had issues with hardware drivers not installing during the OS installation? One of the things I loved about the recovery partition was that all the hardware drivers were there and I didn't have one lick of trouble with any hardware not working because of a lack of drivers on install. My biggest concern would be network adapter drivers because if the machine cannot connect to the internet it can't DL the drivers it needs. Just had a thought... would it be better to slipstream a new Vista install disk with SP1?

Any and all help would be appreciated. I pretty much know just enough about this to get into trouble :)

Thanks in Advance,
Grant