malaac,
In respect to dual or multi booting with Vista, hindsight is the brilliant
teacher.
Specifically, and more importantly, what worked last week (dual / multi
booting) for defined, and intentionally not-defined reasons, just might not
work this day.
Closely read the second sentence (RTM, NOT RC2 anything) from jimmuh’s
previous Post of things and stuff learned the difficult method, not only
learned by jimmuh, many others have learned the same from trial and error
situations.
The below Post was written by “jimmuh†and is more accurate today compared
to the date Posted.
DUAL BOOT DIFFICULTIES
BELOW POSTED BY jimmuh 01-28-2007 within this Forum.
I'm afraid that I'm pretty much a bucket of cold water on this one. If you
want Vista and Windows XP to co-exist as multi-boot partners on the same
system you really need to use Vista Ultimate (RTM, NOT RC2 anything) with
BitLocker enabled and hiding Vista from WinXP BEFORE you ever reboot into
WinXP, or you need to use a third party boot manager to hide Vista from
WinXP. Otherwise, WinXP will immediately set about trashing System Restore
points and Shadow Copy data on the Vista partition during its first session.
Frankly, multi-booting Windows operating systems these days just seems like
a waste for almost all purposes. (YMMV) I'd definitely go with virtual
machines, either through one of the Microsoft offerings (VPC or Virtual
Server) or through VMWare. Run Vista as the host and WinXP under a Virtual
Machine. Or don't run WinXP at all, if you can help it. Or, best yet, just
put each OS on its own physical system.
All that being said, I can't imagine what is happening on your system. I've
had plenty of experience trying to multi-boot Vista with operating systems
before I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. (It can be done, but, to
me, it isn't worth the effort.) I NEVER saw Vista cause problems within
another co-existing operating system. I mean, if you do something untoward
with the boot manager you might make another OS unbootable, but I never saw
Vista mess up the contents of another operating system's partition. Windows
XP is, however, not nearly so well-behaved. It savages anything that looks
like a restore point that it "thinks" is corrupted.
I would be very interesting in knowing whether or not it was really Vista
that caused this issue with your WinXP installations. Can't see how it could
be the case, but I'm willing to learn.
I hope someone else may have more useful information for you.
SIDE NOTE:
Seriously, you might also consider seeking advice from Ms. Dewey at:
www.msdewey.com
Should you seek advice from Ms. Dewey, cautiously review the Posted dates.
Again, what previously worked, likely will *not* work today.