Ubuntu – Package an existing Ubuntu installation into an ISO image

take a look at this article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

There's a package called usb-creator-gtk (and usb-creator-kde for KDE-desktop). This application has a GUI to copy an iso to an USB-drive and make it bootable.

Every modern windows install has recovery related things in the system partitions. Its used for stuff like refreshing your windows install, or going into the recovery console. The other two partitions are HP specific things.

Firstly, you can't simply convert recovery partitions into isos by using cat or dd. There's some other necessary things that are sitting in your bootloader.

I'm not really going to make specific recommendations for software (the one I regularly use isn't really very handy at one off backups), and I'll talk more of a process and how to set this up and what to look for than specific software recommendations.

I have two ways I typically handle this.

1. Make a restore image USB. Make a copy of it (dd on linux, win32 imagewriter on windows). Test restore to the USB you made a copy from, try booting to make sure it works, label the image (I typically name them Restore - so the factory restore image for my HP Stream 11 is RestoreHPStream11Blue8GBWindows8.img. There's probably a HP specific tool for this as well.

2. Image the whole system - Something like clonezilla or most decent imaging software would let you do a one off backup. Do it on a fresh system, test to see if it'll restore. I suppose you could tell it not to backup the OS partition and do a test restore. Create recovery media, label and store.

Did I mention testing my backups? Yes I did.

Essentially though, the backup method you've suggested may not work.

I do suspect there's a third way to do this - make backup isos if supported and use some tool to boot this. That's a bit of a if-maybe, and may work with option 2.