The answer is positive to all of these. In fact, that is what I generally do with all of my new machines: First boot is from the Acronis CD, to create a copy of the factory state of the hard drive.

Yes it will. When you create a backup job, you will see all of the partitions on your disk. Simply check each one of them and the backup will create one file with EVERYTHING included.

 

BTW, you will also have a hidden recovery partition on the disk (a Dell utility) which you can use to restore your system to the "factory shipped" state. If you have Acronis, then you probably won't need this partition and you can delete it and free up a bit more disk space.

Thanks for confirming this!