System Restore and Dual Boot problem

[Malcolm H]

I have Vista Home Premium installed on one hard disk and XP SP2 installed on
a second hard disk.

By keying F8 during boot-up a list of bootable devices is displayed and I
can select either Vista or XP.

This works fine and I can use either OS as required.

The problem is that the process of booting into XP seems to delete restore
points set on the Vista drive i.e. if I set a restore point duing a Vista
session, re-boot to XP for an XP session and then re-boot to Vista I cannot
restore to the previously set restore point, instead I get a message "no
restore points heve been set".

The problem does not happen in reverse i.e. booting into Vista does not seem
to affect restore points set in XP.

Why is this and what can I do to fix the problem?

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi Malcolm,

Yes, this is a well known issue. It has to do with volsnap.sys in XP and the
only resolution is to hide the volume housing the Vista installation from XP
using a third party boot manager. Even if not monitored or with XP's System
Restore disabled the problem will still occur.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Malcolm H]

Thanks Rick. When I am using XP I have no need to access any files in the
Vista partition so maybe your solution will work for me.

Please can you recommend a suitable boot manager?

Malcolm

 

[t@k]

Malcolm H said...

Please can you recommend a suitable boot manager?

Google for "Bootit NG", apparently it can be configured to hide a Vista
drive/partition when booting to XP.

 

[Bert Kinney]

Here's some additional information on dual booing XP and Vista.

Dual Booting Windows Vista & Windows XP:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org

 

[Malcolm H]

Thank you for that Bert. Very interesting and potentially very useful!

At present I have resigned myself to ignoring the absence of restore points
in Vista and am relying instead on Acronis True Image to backup my Vista
partition as required.

Certainly BootIt NG looks like a good solution. I have both Vista and XP
installed on different physical disks and both are working well. Do you
know if it would be possible to add BootIt NG without disturbing my existing
OS partitions which were created by the Vista disk management utility? I ask
this question because I think I understand from one of the BootIt videos
that all partitions should be created with BootIt NG if BootIt NG is to be
used successfully?

Thank you again for your help.

Malcolm H

 

[Bert Kinney]

The partitions that are already created should be fine. Any additional
partitions should be created using BING if you choose to use BING. Once BING
is installed, note the possession of the partitions in the MBR Details. The
videos with help with this.

Regards,
Bert Kinney MS-MVP Shell/User
http://bertk.mvps.org
Member: http://dts-l.org