[vox-tech] grub boot recovery image

[Jim]

Greetings:
My boss had a laptop that would not boot into vista because of a virus.
I was about to pop in a live cd but found that this 'dell' laptop gave
me an option for recovery.  It let me rewrite the hard drive with an
image that was fresh from factory i.e. day 1 configuration.  My boss
didn't have anything important so I did just that and it worked like a
charm.

Intrigued with this I was wondering if this can be done with linux.
Lets say that I built a pc w/ oh I don't know, ubuntu, and I wanted to
have the same setup as my bosses pc had.  Can this be done and be as
user friendly with linux?  Could I somehow make grub boot into some sort
of gui script that can have a presaved image file of a fresh install on
that pc?  Mind you this should be simple to use for the masses out there
that aren't computer savy, like me :)

I know quite a bit about cars, I know very little about computers.

Jim