Vista (Dual Boot)

[lee black]

Hi
I have installed vista as a dual boot alongside XP.
XP boots from my "c"Drive and Vista from my "d"Drive, i know want to remove
XP and make Vista run from my "c"Drive, can this be done without
re-installing? Or can i remove XP and treat my "d" Drive as the primary
drive and still run Vista

Thank you in advance

Regards

Lee

 

[John Whitworth]

No. You are using C: as your active partition, and this is where your boot
configuration resides. There is no way that you are going to be able to move
an OS across drives like that.

Why are you so desperate to say goodbye to XP so quickly?

JW

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

For starters, it's not healthy for Vista to dual boot XP and Vista. The OP
would be better advised to just install Vista and forget XP if that's where
he wants to go anyway.

 

[Scott]

Colin Barnhorst spake thusly on 12/20/2006 5:47 PM:

For starters, it's not healthy for Vista to dual boot XP and Vista. The
OP would be better advised to just install Vista and forget XP if that's
where he wants to go anyway.

And what makes it "Not Healthy"?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You lose Vista system restore points and other VSS files due to an
incompatibility between the XP and Vista volsnap.sys (VSS driver). This is
a known issue and will not be fixed. Do a search on "volsnap.sys" on this
ng for details.

 

[I.P. Nichols]

You lose Vista system restore points and other VSS files due to an
incompatibility between the XP and Vista volsnap.sys (VSS driver). This
is a known issue and will not be fixed. Do a search on "volsnap.sys" on
this ng for details.

See topic System Restore: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920928

"System Restore does not work until a new restore point is created. Shadow
copies of earlier versions of files are also affected...

Resolution
To make full use of the System Restore safety features when you restart from
a previous operating system to Windows Vista, we recommend that you manually
create a restore point."

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The resolution does not help the user who was expecting to find his Vista
restore points, previous file versions, and so forth after having returned
to Vista from XP. I am pointing out that dual booting with XP will lead to
the loss of Vista VSS files. Every time. There is no resolution for that
unless the user hides the Vista volume from XP either with a third-party
boot manager or BitLocker. The kb tells the user how to get going again,
but not how to avert the disaster in the first place. Do not dual-boot XP
and Vista on a production computer without taking steps to protect your
valuable Vista files.

 

[CZ]

For starters, it's not healthy for Vista to dual boot XP and Vista. Thewould be better advised to just install Vista and forget XP if that's where
he wants to go anyway.incompatibility between the XP and Vista volsnap.sys (VSS driver). This is
a known issue and will not be fixed. Do a search on "volsnap.sys" on this
ng for details.

Colin:

IMO, it is healthy to use Vista to dual boot XP and Vista if you understand
the limitations.
I multiple boot between XP Home, XP Pro, Win2k3 server, and Vista without
any regrets.
Vista build 5744 is my main op system.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Yes, if you know the implications. But folks should not give general advice
to dual boot without also providing the caveat. That would be a disservice.
I stand by the advice not to dual boot Vista and XP on a production or
primary computer without safeguarding your important files. I urge you to
move past the beta mentality about Vista for the sake of the many, many new
users who will be seeking advice here starting in February. They will all
be using Vista on production and primary home computers.

 

[CZ]

Colin:

To some extent we are saying the same thing.

There are two approaches to answering a NG question.

1) One approach is to make the decision for the user (e.g. just tell the
user what to do).

2) The other approach is to provide the user with information concerning the
limitations and support the user making the decision. This approach greatly
enhances the value of using Google to research an issue. An experienced
user can benefit from this approach, as well as an inexperienced user; an
experienced user may not benefit from the first approach.


An example:
Your initial response to OP:
"For starters, it's not healthy for Vista to dual boot XP and Vista. The OP
would be better advised to just install Vista and forget XP if that's where
he wants to go anyway.

Your response to a question about your initial response provided impt info
re: the limitations:
"You lose Vista system restore points and other VSS files due to an
incompatibility between the XP and Vista volsnap.sys (VSS driver). This is
a known issue and will not be fixed. Do a search on "volsnap.sys" on this
ng for details."

I would have said that you can use Vista to dual boot with XP, but there are
limitations, and then mention them in the same post.
Also, I would add that this loss only occurs if/when you boot into XP. If
you primarily use Vista (as I do), the impact can be negligible.
Note that I did not qualify my response as healthy or unhealthy.

Re: "I urge you to move past the beta mentality about Vista for the sake of
the many, many new users who will be seeking advice here starting in
February. They will all be using Vista on production and primary home
computers."

I am not sure what a "beta mentality" is, but know that I have been
dual/multiple booting since the NT based boot mgr was released (in NT
v3.5?). I used to dual boot Windows with Netware 3. There are excellent
reason to dual boot regardless of RTM or beta status of an op system. And,
IMO, the user (and a Google search) is best supported if the user is given
info for his/her decision.

Some of the new users you refer to will be experienced users in MS op
systems, but not in Vista. Using approach two will provide useful info for
them as well as support for the truly "inexperienced" user.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

We just should not underestimate the impact of advice and this is one topic
that impacts the security of users' data. It is no mere setting to satisfy
a user's preferences. I just hope that we all make a good transition away
from the CPP days when we had Vista pretty much to ourselves and keep in
mind that the majority of folks coming here soon are not technology
entusiasts. Let's earn their trust.

 

[Christopher L. Estep]

The resolution does not help the user who was expecting to find his Vista
restore points, previous file versions, and so forth after having returned
to Vista from XP. I am pointing out that dual booting with XP will lead
to the loss of Vista VSS files. Every time. There is no resolution for
that unless the user hides the Vista volume from XP either with a
third-party boot manager or BitLocker. The kb tells the user how to get
going again, but not how to avert the disaster in the first place. Do not
dual-boot XP and Vista on a production computer without taking steps to
protect your valuable Vista files.

That is the purpose of *drive partitioning*. Running two operating systems
on a single partition is *never* recommended (whether it's a production
machine or not) for precisely this issue.

However, one other issue that you can run into (and there is a solution for
it
other than BitLocker) is "drive-letter inconsistency". This happens when a
second (or subsequent) operating system is installed without any knowledge
that there is a preceding operating system (or operating systems) ahead of
it.

In the case of adding Windows Vista to an existing Windows XP-based system,
run Setup from *within* XP and choose Custom Install, selecting (preferably)
a pre-formatted target partition (if the partition hasn't been formatted,
Setup will
format it for you). This gives you drive-letter consistency and preserves
both
XP and Vista restore points (it is drive-letter inconsistency, caused
usually by
outside-the-OS installation methods and/or partition-hiding software,
that can cause restore-point loss). That has been my own method for
dual-boot
installs of XP and Vista (and one I still use today).


Christopher L. Estep

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Who's talking about partitioning? Running Vista and XP in a dual boot
scenario of any configuration, partitions, drives, whatever, is the issue.
If you set up Vista and XP to dual boot such that XP can see the Vista
volumes you will lose all Vista VSS based files like system restore points,
the new previous versions files, and so on just by booting into XP. Drive
letter consistency simply does not matter. Period. It is the XP
volsnap.sys (VSS driver) that is the cause.

 

[Michael Jennings]

Responsible. Does that mean no more boasts about swiping OS-X?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

 

[John C. Iliff]

Colin

I'm not yet sure your warning applies to the installation of Vista from
'within' XP, where XP and Vista are seen as being on different partitions,
and the restore points are then saved to their respective drives. I suspect
that the only problem is where you will see Vista on 'C:\' and XP on 'C:\'
depending on which you are booting to. Can you please clarify?

John

 

[Jane C]

It doesn't matter how Vista was installed. XP will kill off Vista restore
points as soon as you boot into XP. The only way to avoid this happening is
to either use BitLocker encryption on Vista, or to effectively hide the
Vista volume from XP completely, either by using a boot manager with that
capability, or by using the BIOS to select the hard drive to boot from,
keeping both installations separate, ie boot from hd0, install XP, boot from
hd1, install Vista, and switch between the 2 via the BIOS. And that doesn't
help at all if one only has one physical hard drive with multiple
partitions.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

It doesn't have anything to do with drive enumeration, whether it is done
based on the BIOS or whether the drive enumeration by XP is used at the time
of Setup. Please lay aside the drive enumeration issue and take a good look
at what happens.

At XP bootup, XP's volsnap.sys (the VSS driver) will enumerate the VSS files
system-wide (on all volumes it can see). In order to prevent the user from
attempting to restore from a corrupted VSS file, XP volsnap.sys will delete
any VSS files that are not in XP volsnap.sys's correct format. Enhancements
to VSS in Vista are such that Vista VSS files are not in the correct XP
format. XP volsnap.sys is incompatible with Vista VSS. XP is not
Vista-aware. Vista volsnap.sys is backwards compatible with XP VSS and so
booting into Vista does not harm XP VSS files.

The only time this does not happen is when you boot into XP Safe Mode. This
is because volsnap.sys does not run in Safe Mode so no Vista files are
deleted.

MS has studied the issue for at least a year and a half and determined that
the resolution was an extensive rewrite of XP. Because this issue does not
impact the user base very much, MS decided not to do the fix. Remember that
only a tiny fraction of 1% of the user base of some half billion Windows
installations involves multi-booting. It is confined to technology
specialists and technology enthusiasts. Typically consumers have no idea
what it is or are interested in using it. No IT pro I know will allow
multi-booting machines in production use in an enterprise. With
virtualization the need for multibooting has lessened even more. It is a
simple matter to run a legacy OS in a virtual machine on a desktop.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Additional note: This is not a problem confined to system restore points
nor is it caused by System Restore. System Restore just happens to use
volsnap.sys to take its snapshots for the restore points it creates. This
is why you can restore from an existing restore point in Safe Mode but you
cannot create a new restore point in Safe Mode. Volsnap.sys isn't running
in Safe Mode. This also why the problem is unrelated to what volumes System
Restore might or might not be monitoring.

All those nice Previous Versions of your files that you can pick from in
Vista when you want to revert to a file in the form it was yesterday are
poof once you boot XP. A lot of other files are involved also.

 

[CZ]

No IT pro I know will allow multi-booting machines in production use in
Colin:

There are IT professionals that cover the non-enterprise sector that have
done dual boot setups in certain production situations.

Colin, an authoritative style is very desirable in an enterprise
environment, but those of us that serve the smaller business environment can
find it desirable to be more flexible (i.e. per the company manager's
request).