Which third-party tools can affect restore points?

[Milhouse Van Houten]

Unhelpfully, the blog post below was closed for comments, so a list was
never generated of just which bootable tools would be susceptible to this
problem. I'm assuming that about 100% of them out there are not based on
"some version of Vista," and a large percentage of them are not based on PE,
but I don't know that for sure so am asking here.

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...rd-party-tools-can-affect-restore-points.aspx

How third-party tools can affect restore points

Many of our readers are familiar with how dual-booting Windows Vista and
Windows XP can cause restore points to be deleted by Windows XP (see our
recent blog post for details). What you might not know is that some
third-party tools can also cause the deletion of restore points by Windows
Vista. If the third-party tool runs at boot time without running in Windows
Preinstallation Environment (PE) or some version of Windows Vista, any
changes that the tool makes to the disk will cause Windows Vista, once
started, to invalidate and thus delete the restore points. Why are the
restore points deleted? Because if a tool makes a change to the volume
without going through Volsnap.sys (the volume shadow copy driver), when
Windows Vista is started, it detects that it doesn't have an accurate
representation of the changes to the volume and thus can't accurately
reconstitute older versions of the file for System Restore (or any other
application). This issue doesn't affect Windows XP because the restore
points are actually backup copies of system files stored under the Windows
folder. As long as the third-party tool doesn't change those files, the
restore points in Windows XP remain intact.

To avoid having restore points deleted in Windows Vista, use third-party
tools that run in Windows Vista or a version of Windows PE or Windows
Recovery Environment (RE) that is based on Windows Vista.

--Jill and Dan Stevenson

 

[John Barnes]

I don't know if the problem has been fixed, but PerfectDisk does, or did.

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Milhouse

I believe that article is only closed for "anonymous" comments. You are
welcome to click the "Join" button at the top right of the webpage and
create an account. You will then be able to post comments on the articles.

However, that article you are referring to is very old and there may not be
a lot of interest. You might want to start a new thread in the
news://msnews.microsoft.public.windows.vista.file_management newsgroup to
generate some feedback.

Here are some links you might interest you.

Windows RE Notes:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/default.aspx

The Filing Cabinet : How restore points and other recovery features in
Windows Vista are affected when you dual-boot with Windows XP:
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/07/14/441829.aspx

AumHa Forums:
http://aumha.net/viewtopic.php?p=137580&sid=513a032d978bd3e98ce6ff1120ba7d98

Vista Forums / Vista Security & Recovery / Recovery & Backup:
http://www.vistaforums.com/Forum/RssFeed44-0-0-1.aspx