raid 0 setup dual OS

[rwolds9]

I have a raid 0 setup with Xp on one partition and Vista Home Premium on the other. I am considering purchasing DD10 to be able to hide Vista from XP. With my current setup I can't create any automatic system restore points in Vista due to XP's shadow copying. I have read several posts about DD10 corrupting the operating system etc. and am hesitant to screw up a working system. Has anyone installed DD10 on a similar raid setup? Any problems? Thanks for your help.

[MudCrab]

Is your Vista booting from its own partition or is it booting from the XP partition? Are you using the Vista boot manager to switch between them?

If it's booting from the XP partition, you won't be able to hide the XP partition from Vista and have Vista boot.

If you're using Vista's boot manager and Vista is booting from the XP partition (the default), I don't know if OSS will be able to separate them. It may still just boot to the Vista boot manager.

I currently have 2 XP Pro, 1 Vista and 2 linux boots on my computer and use OSS to boot between them. The XP and Vista partitions are on a RAID 0 array. They are completely isolated from each other (the other boot partitions are hidden), but I installed them that way from the beginning.

As far as DD10 corrupting the Vista partition, just don't use DD to make any changes to the Vista partition. Only use the Vista disk manager for that. Also let Vista create/format its own partition during install, don't use a partition formatted by DD to install Vista.

[rwolds9]

I am using the Vista bootloader . I installed xp first and the vista into another partition on the raid volume. My boot options are "earlier version of windows" or vista. I tried using BootitNG to hide the Vista partition without success. I also cannot create restore points automatically in Vista. I can create manually. but as soon as I reboot ,back into Vista not XP, the restore points are gone.

[MudCrab]

I'm not that sure about how the Vista restore points work, as I haven't used them, but I'm pretty sure you won't be able to get any boot manager to work well until you're not using the Vista boot loader and your XP and Vista installs are completely isolated from each other. This will probably require a reinstall of Vista and maybe XP too.

When I installed Vista, I backed up my XP partitions with TI, deleted the partitions from the array, installed Vista (letting it create and format it's own partition), restored my XP partitions, used DD to manually set the boot back to one of my XP partitions, modified the boot.ini files as necessary, installed OSS, setup the OS menu options to hide the necessary partitions from each other, etc. I have OSS installed on another drive, so it's files don't get messed with when I make changes to the array.

[rwolds9]

Problem: I purchased an upgrade version of Vista. I didn't realize that you couldn't do a clean install of Vista without having Xp present first. That's how I wound up with the partitoned raid volume. I,m not eager to upgrade over xp, I think that's a recipe for trouble! Seems like I would have to install the two os on separate disks, ending the raid setup, or purchase a full version of Vista.

[MudCrab]

If you're going to reinstall, just setup two separate XP boots. Install OSS and get them hidden from each other, etc. Then install the Vista upgrade on one of them. If XP has just been cleanly installed, the upgrade will probably go okay.

[rwolds9]

Thanks for taking the time to help.
Rich

[MatthewE]

-{ Quote: "
As far as DD10 corrupting the Vista partition, just don't use DD to make any changes to the Vista partition. Only use the Vista disk manager for that. Also let Vista create/format its own partition during install, don't use a partition formatted by DD to install Vista." }-

What's wrong with letting DD make changes to the Vista partition? I think you're right. I've made a mess for myself trying to let DD make a primary partition from my Vista-preinstalled C: drive. What's the deal here? You sound like an intelligent umm... Crab.

[MudCrab]

-{ Quote: "What's wrong with letting DD make changes to the Vista partition?" }-
People have reported many problems with using DD to create (and especially format) the NTFS partition for Vista. Apparently Vista uses a slightly different format/version of NTFS and DD doesn't get it right. Vista will usually error on the first reboot of an install or corruption will occur after using the system for a short time.

-{ Quote: "I think you're right. I've made a mess for myself trying to let DD make a primary partition from my Vista-preinstalled C: drive. What's the deal here?" }-
Until Acronis gets the Vista support bugs fixed, it's just better to let Vista handle its own partition creation/formatting.

-{ Quote: "You sound like an intelligent umm... Crab." }- Thanks.