Dual Boot XP and Vista - Fix System Restore To Keep Restore Points In Vista

How does this compare to using a product such as Boot Magic or Acronis OS Selector which will “hide” your Vista partition when you boot XP and vice versa? That’s how I handle dual booting and seems to work fine for me.

Rick

http://www.Hogans-Systems.com

Hi Rick,
I don’t believe it really matters as long as Vista is hidden from XP. Thanks for your comments, Ron

In my case hiding the partition with VISTA via TweakUI
did not solve the problem.

The restore points in Vista are still delited when I boot into XP.

Will be very gratefull if anybody can tell me why?

I came across this method of hiding drives in XP. Is it doing the same thing? I would think it should work, but who knows.

start–>run–>gpedit.msc—->user configuration > Administrative Templates > windows components > windows explorer > hide these specified drives in My Computer

Hi Brian,
Thanks for the info.
Ron

Note also that in that section of gpedit.msc there’s a “Prevent access to drives from My Computer,” which looks like an even stronger option compared to “hide these specified drives in My Computer.”

Separately, I tested disabling the two Volume Shadow Copy in XP’s Services, and I expected that to work, but for some reason it didn’t.

Here’s more on the issue:
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html

Hello Brian,
Thanks for the great link and information. It is appreciated.
Ron

Unfortunately, it turns out that the TweakUI fix is an urban legend: it doesn’t work, as confirmed in the MS newsgroups. Its only purpose is a casual block against users accessing the excluded drive(s), but XP and other programs have no problem accessing it.

So it’s use a third-party boot manager or use Vista’s Bitlocker…or just don’t use XP.

Thanks, Microsoft.

Hello Brian,
Thanks for the information. I’ll contact the author and see what he has to say as well.
Regards, Ron

Interestingly, my problem is just the opposite.

When I dual boot into XP (partiton # 1 on my drive), my Vista partition is hidden and all of my drive mappings and restore points are “as i like”. I used BING to copy my XP partition to a new primary Vista partition (partition # 3 on the same drive), adjusted the boot.ini file accordingly, dual booted into this new “Vista” partitin and then upgraded into this “Vista” partition. Partiton # 2 holds Media Center.

However, when i dual boot into Vista, Vista “sees” my XP partition (# 1) as drive letter D: and consequentilly shifts the remaining drive letters down the alphabet. PartitionMagic is not compatabile with Vista so I can not hide the XP partition. BING has tools to hide partitions but upon “bootup” all of the primary partitions are correctly hidden.

My only conclusion is the Vista has “some code” that “searches” for other Windows partitons during the installation/upgrade process that “unhides” this partition. So far I have not been able to find any other tools (and any within Vista) whereby I can hide my XP partition.

Does anyone have any thoughts or observations ?

Many thanks,

Paul

First to Brian - I did contact the author of the information and his conclusion was the same. Use bit locker for now.

Hi Paul,
Interesting. Hopefully someone here may have a tought.
Thanks for the comment, Ron

Would not assigning a drive letter to your Vista partition work? When you’re in XP that is. Administrative tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management, and remove drive letter assignment for the Vista partition?

I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a suggestion.

Hi Laszlo,
Interesting. It is worth a try.
Thanks, Ron

Can anyone please tell me how to stop system restore points from dropping off. I only have resent ones availibal and the ones I want are gone.

Thanks Richard

PS I am running Vista by its self.

Thanks

Hi guys,

I have installed XP on C and going to install Vista on D drive of same harddisk. When setup copies the files and restarts my notebook for setup to be completed, I CAN load the OS means XP I installed previously but CAN’T load the OS I just installed means Vista. Same case I’m having if I install Windows 2000 on C and Windows XP on D.

Any help will highly be appreciated. Thanks

Hello Sajid,
Reinstall XP on C and Vista on D. If you still do not have a dual boot menu for both operating systems, download a copy of Vista Boot Pro from here.
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

Still having problems? May I suggest posting your problem over at the LG forum. http://www.help.lockergnome.com

Hope this helps, Ron

Hello Ron Schenone,

Thanks for your post. Well! I have Dual boot menu… All I need to load vista from the menu. when I clicks on vista. It stays there and blank screen remains infront of me. It seems to me that installing Vista after xp, vista loading files are in C: on which I have XP. or it may look for active partitioning which is C: and xp is there… or I have to do something with BCDEdit.exe…. I dont know what to do… Pls see if you can help.

Thanks

I have installed XP. While installing Vista after XP when it restarts my notebook during vista installation I’m unable to boot into vista. I have XP on C: and Vista on D: Could any body of you please solve my problem. I am unable t figure out why its happening. I can load XP but Can’t load Vista.

If you dual boot using a second HDD will it still overwrite the sys restore?

Hi Matthew,
Yes it will. I dual boot using two drives - same results.
Ron

Hi All
I dual boot using two hard drives XP on c: and Vista on g: and was having the same problem with losing restore points in Vista after accessing
XP , And returning to vista, I found that disabling the {G:} drive from within
XP in Device manager seemed to have fixed the problem, with this drive disabled xp will not access it..and therefore not delete your restore points
This will not fix the problem for people using a 1 drive 2 partition setup
but i hope it helps the ones with 2 drives, and also you will NOT be able to access Vista files from XP with this drive disabled. Hope this helps.

Hi Tim W.
Thanks for the tip.
Ron

Hi,
I just wanted to put my experience out there… I boutght my PC an HP Pavillion m7750n with Vista preinstalled. No vista cd as pc comes with a recovery partition built in. Well… I too wanted to dual boot as though I was impressed with the UI of Vista, some of my programs/drivers would not work with Vista. Following some of the instructions I found online, I was able to dual boot successfully by using several sources online but this one here: http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/about88231.html worked for me (It was simpler). I only used Acronis Disk Director Suite v.10 to expand my drives more. My only problem now is that I have to hit F11 to get to the dual boot/selection screen. If I don’t, it will automatically boot to XP.

Thanks for the info. and link.

Greetings,

I have a tripple boot system. 2x Windows XP and 1x Vista. I have three physical hard drives with two partitions each. On each HD, the first parttion holds the OS and the second partition on that HD holds data for that OS.

The way I have system restore setup is as follows: Within each operating system, I turned off system restore on all partitions except for that operating systems own partition and the second data partition on same physical hard drive. Thus, the system restore is only turned on for its own partion and the data partition on the same physical used to store data for that particular OS.

With system restore implemented this way, will Windows XP still delete the restore points within Vista and possibly even those in the other Windows XP installation?

The reason I ask, is because I needed to do a system restore a couple of weeks back; however, I kept getting an error. I then used the method of manually restoring the system restore point (more info can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545).

Hello Terry,
I can only tell you about my setup. I have a dual boot Vista - XP on separate hard disks. My restore points still get deleted. I wish I had better a better explanation for you and/or solution.

I have yet to test this solution, but just stumbled across the following Microsoft KB article that may be of assistance:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926185
It looks like it may be a manual version of what TweakUI was meant to be doing, but maybe it is more severe …
I may give this a go when I get to that stage of rebuilding my PC …

Hi lain,
Thanks for the link. I’ll be doing an article on this as well. If you do decide to try this, please let us know your results.

Regards, Ron

For those with dual boot xp and vista on separate HDD’s I find it easier to disable the vista HDD in BIOS before booting to xp and thus preventing xp deleting vista restore points.

Hi ianm,
Thanks for sharing your idea with us. Two thumbs up!

[...]   Re: recovery disc One of the problems in dual booting Vista and Windows XP is, that once you boot into XP, all of your restore points are deleted in Vista. There are workarounds, for example Dual Boot XP and Vista - Fix System Restore To Keep Restore Points In Vista ~ The Blade by Ron Schen… [...]

[...] Vista and XP, be aware that each time you boot into XP it destroys Vista’s system restore data: http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/200…ints-in-vista/ — Gary VanderMolen, MS-MVP "brianfest" <guest> wrote in message [...]