First Defense and Repartitioning

I want to install Vista into an empty partition and need to increase the size of my C: partition for the two additional snapshots that I will need. I have plenty of room on the D: partition on the same drive to do this.

My guess is the steps are:

1. Disable preboot.
2 Increase the C partition size with Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director.
3. Reboot.
4. Enable preboot
5. Backup MBR.

I want to keep my two existing snapshots of Windows XP and be able to get them back after repartitioning?

Is this the proper procedure?

Many thanks

 

I may not be the best person to answer this having already borked my HD twice this weekend playing around with multiboot and FD-ISR but what you suggest seems sensible to me.
I would probably disable pre-boot again once you've backed it up to a floppy before starting the Vista DVD install.

A couple of other points:
Vista will certainly see your 2 XP systems on installation but it doesn't seem to like being installed on partitions formatted in NTFS by Disk Director. I've seen recommended on another thread that you should create the partition space etc using DD or Partition Magic but format it via Disk Management in XP before installing Vista.
I'm intrigued how you are going to get all 3 systems to boot once Vista is installed.
Is this via modifying the boot.ini on your primary XP system to 'see' Vista or are you going to use the Vista Boot loader?
I'll be interested to see how you get on as I resisted doing this out of fear about what the Vista bootloader might do to the MBR and FD-ISR pre-boot.

 

I would have what you know to be a reliable backup that you know will restore, before I tried it. I can't recall my specific steps but I crapped up my system pretty badly when I tried Vista about a month and a half or so ago and was very glad I had everything backed up.

LOL-- and this was on a laptop while I'm away on a temporary assignment. Good thing I had this handy dandy Western Digital 120 GB Passport to use with my laptop.

 

I have two existing snapshots and a good Acronis Backup. How does this sound?

1. Disable preboot.
2. Increase the C partition size with Acronis Disk Director.
3. Reboot.
4. Enable preboot
5. Backup all with Acronis (which also backs up the MBR)
6. Create an empty snapshot.
7. Disable Preboot
8. Clean install Vista into the empty snapshot without formatting.
9. Enable preboot.

I have already done an upgrade install of Vista over my WindowsXP Pro snapshot, and FD-ISR works fine with Vista, however, many of my programs don't run under Vista which leaves alot of garbage on the harddrive. I want to do a clean install of Vista to experiment. I would then create another backup snapshot of Vista resulting in 4 snapshots. 2 for XP Pro and 2 for Vista. I would backup XP Pro with Acronis and backup Vista with it's own backup imaging function.

That way, if it works, I could go back and forth between Vista and XP Pro with just a reboot.

If anyone has any suggestions, they would be much appreciated.

 

Ah, got it now...
Can you update FD-ISR snapshots in the existing Vista snapshot and presumably data anchoring still works OK?
I hope a 'clean' Vista install into an empty snapshot just doesn't behave differently to an upgrade install as then I could foresee problems.
If a clean install works then I think this might be the way to try Vista RC1 safely
Good luck and let us know how you get on.

 

Data anchoring between Vista and XP did not work when I did the upgrade install.

I am only anchoring the Desktop and NOD32. NOD32 does not work with Vista, so I guess I will have to turn off the anchoring and just do a virus definition update when I switch between XP snapshots. The Desktop would not Anchor when switching between XP and Vista, so I will put those programs onto my D drive to keep them intact.

I only have the System and Program Files on the C drive. Everything else is on the D partition.

 

I have looked through all of the Help files in FD-ISR and the FAQ's at Leapfrog and have found nothing about changing partition sizes after installing First Defense.

Has anyone been able to do this and preserve existing snapshots?

 

Absolutely, no problem for me. Only potential "hitch" is moving the partition or any mod that would affect the location of or pointer to C:\$ISR\0\$ISRBIN. FD-ISR will come up with pre-boot disabled in that event, but after one more boot, it should have corrected itself -- I forget whether it re-enables pre-boot itself or if you need to go into the Action menu and do that manually. Although I generally skip it, disabling pre-boot yourself before any of this certainly wouldn't hurt.

I'm not sure which software you have for this operation but I have both Partition Magic 8.01 and Acronis Disk Director 10 and I honestly have to say that I trust PM over ADD at this point for system partition modifications.

In any event, a completely reliable backup you are confident will restore must precede any of these kinds of operations -- sorry, standard disclaimer.

 

Thanks for the advice. This is how far I have gotten:

Made Acronis backups with both preboot On and Off.

Tried to resize C partition with Acronis Disk Director. Using Manual mode it would just hang after I told it to Commit and Reboot.

Using Wizard, it would reboot twice, Analyze on first reboot then Synch with OS and then reboot and do the same thing then reboot into Windows with no changes.

I will try Partition Magic 8.05. I think I have a copy around somewhere. I will keep you posted.

 

Aha. I will keep my fingers crossed.

 

I just had a horrible experience with Acronis Disk Director.

I've been using it for quite a wile, moving, resizing partitions without any problems. I was messing around with my wife's notebook and I noticed that I hadn't updated her backups for a while. I decided to give her a separate partition to store the archives and backups. I used ADD to set up a 20gb recovery partition, set it up, and let it go and do it's thing. I come back after a while to check on it and it says it's done but there was an error. I reboot, no operating system. I boot to the ADD rescue CD and see that when the partition was split up, it made the new 20gb one the C drive and set it as the primary, and all my operating system and files were now on a logical D drive.

Things went downhill after that. I tried merging the partitions back together, but just kept getting errors. I tried switching the primary to the other partition, no luck. The last thing I tried was deleting the 20gb partition so the primary would default the remaining partition. That killed everything. Now the partition table in pieces, and I discovered the backup snapshot archive I kept was also bad (and old).

The only other thing left for me to do was avoid my wife!

 

Update:

Partition Magic worked great on first try. I had to reboot a couple of times to get Windows to recognize the D: drive. I am now booted, with all snapshots intact and preboot turned back on.

Next Step:

Update my backup snapshot, create a new empty snapshot for Vista, backup system again with Acronis for new MBR backukp, boot to my empty snapshot, and install Vista with no formatting, install First Defense on Vista.

I will keep you posted.

 

I'll be watching for it.

 

Update 2:

I was able to install Vista to the empty snapshot. However, First Defense would not install. Error message stating that it would only work on Windows 2000, 2003 or XP. This must have been coded into the FD install program as I was able to get it working when I did a Vista Upgrade install the other day. I was able to get Acronis True Image installed (I had to turn off UAC in Vista) and make a backup which was 10 gigs smaller than the Vista built in backup image.

I have now restored the system to just before I did the Vista install into the clean snapshot.

Next step:

Do a clean WindowsXP install into the empty snapshot, install First Defense, then immediately do a Vista upgrade install from XP. Hopefully, that will do the trick so I can boot back and forth between XP and Vista snapshots.

 

I don't see any Windows Vista

 

That was my experience, too, the first time I tried to install FD-ISR in Vista.

THAT's what I want to hear about. Hopefully, Raxco will make that unnecessary sooner than later but I would still be able to get ready ahead of RTM.

 

The interesting question is whether the new version of FD-ISR by Raxco is going to support Vista.....

 

Well, I certainly hope they are just taking a little longer to vet the latest Leapfrog build and release it momentarily rather than revising for Vista and not releasing anything until Vista comes out.

 

I'm not really looking forward to winVista. WinXPproSP2 will be my OS for the next 5 years. A brand new OS is always a trouble-maker, I had the same experience with win2000pro.

 

Agreed.
It's taken me five years to:
a) Get to grips with the 'innards' of XP
b) Make it a secure and productive OS
Not sure I want to start again just yet with what looks like a buggy/ unstable new OS.
However, maybe its just curiosity, but I'd like to have a play with Vista RC1 whilst knowing my day to day OS is stable and secure and I've casting around to see if there's a safe way to do that.
Virtual machines look too complicated for my brain and I'm not sure how they're going to play with FD-ISR (an essential for me), BING - which says it supports Vista - seemed to stuff up FD-ISR (although I suspect in retrospect that was operator error ) and I don't much fancy playing with the Vista Bootloader yet, so if the next FD-ISR can work with Vista it could be the best option to my mind.

 

Don't know about the next version, but ...

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=123098&highlight=firstdefense vista

Acadia

 

If you like troubles, go ahead with winVista, it's not my computer, but don't expect any advice or help from me.

 

Yes you're probably right - now, where were those Vista forums?.....

 

3rd Update:

SUCCESS!! I now have 4 snapshots that I can switch between. They are:

1. XP Primary
2. XP Backup
3. Vista Primary
4. Vista Backup

Plus I have two archived snapshots on my external drive

1. Clean Vista with only FD-ISR.
2. Clean XP with FD-ISR.

I have backed all up to the external drive with ATI Workstation.

I can now play with Vista to my hearts content and experiment with different programs. If they don't work, I just go to the Vista backup snapshot.

When I want to use my computer for everyday purposes, I can just boot to one of the XP Pro snapshots. I can play around there also because of FD-ISR and True Image.

The only anomaly that I have found is that when I bring up the FD-ISR menu in Vista, I get a message that I can't create a snapshot until I reboot the computer. I just click OK and the message goes away and FD-ISR works as normal.

I am elated with this program. The Vista help files, although not complete, are very interesting and more complete than XP's and better written. Particularly about all of the security built into the program. From a very preliminary reading it appears that Vista will eliminate much of the malware threat...at least for a while.