Inserting new partition

Well, there goes that theory.

I had suspected that your Vista partition was created by Vista and had a 1024-sector offset, but that's not the case. If it had been the case then it might have explained the behavior you saw when you restored the Vista partition -- TI would have relocated the starting sector of the partition from an offset of 1024 sectors to an offset of 63 sectors. This action would have caused the GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) of the Vista partition to change, and thus led to the loss of the pointer in the BCD file (it would have had "unknown" for an entry), causing the "Winload.exe is missing or corrupt" error message.

The restore should have worked. I can't see a reason for it not working. So what happened? I can only return to my hunch about the behavior of TI 11 and its behind the scenes modifications to ensure that Vista will boot properly, even after a 1024-offset partition gets relocated to 63-sector offset. Without knowing exactly what it does, I can only speculate that it must not do the right thing for an installation like yours, where Vista boots from partition #1 but runs from a different partition.

Dual boot installations like yours done "The Microsoft Way" are kind of delicate beasts. With tangled partitions (boot files in the XP partition, Vista in another) and each partition visible to both operating systems, restoration of a partition without triggering drive letter changes or other problems is tenuous at best. You may not be aware of this, but did you know that Windows XP will delete all of the restore points on the Vista partition if it is able to "see" the Vista partition when it is running?

If you really want to make a dual boot system robust then any OS that is not running should be hidden from the one that is running and a boot manager (like Grub4DOS or GRUB) should be used to switch between them. Then each OS can be independently deleted and restored with no effect on any other OS. Again, that's another issue and it still does not explain why your Vista restore attempt failed, but at least you know how to fix it should it happen again.

 

Mark:

What I have been doing this morning is repeating the process in the other thread to see if it replicates. I have used TI 11 to create a full disk image, and simply restored it booting from the VistaPE CD.

Once again XP has restored successfully, as have the other partitions except for Vista. Vista looks as if it's booting normally, but when it gets to selecting a user it goes haywire. I have checked the state of the BCD and the drive letters have been changed about.

I am not confident I understand bcdedit well enough yet to correct things that way, so again I have used Ghost in XP to restore Vista and that is OK.

So you are right, ATI simply can't handle a dual-boot situation set up the Microsoft way, not if it contains Vista anyway.

I think we can leave it there, but for a programme whose only purpose is backup it's not very clever is it?

 

Earthling:

Then that is a different issue; one where Windows reassigns drive letters when rebooting. If you were able to boot into Vista then the BCD is OK. If, when booting into Vista, you were unable to start your existing user profile then that is caused by the drive letter of the Vista partition changing. That's another problem that can crop up with a multiboot disk when the different operating systems can see each other's partitions.

Apparently Ghost can work around this by itself.

This might work. Before restoring the Vista partition, use DD 10 to hide the XP partition. Then restore only the Vista partition. Reboot with XP still hidden. Vista should assign itself the drive letter C. Then unhide the XP partition and reboot.

 

It's becoming quite clear that I cannot successfully restore the Vista partition with ATI 11, not so long as I have this Microsoft dual boot setup anyway. If I want to be certain of it working I shall just have to continue using Ghost from XP.

It's very disappointing.

But thanks for your efforts again.

 

Earthling:

Seems to be so. Here is the part that still confuses me. There should be a persistent entry in the Vista registry that identifies the Vista partition's GUID as belonging to the drive letter C. When restored and Windows boots it should assign C as the drive letter of the Vista partition.

If it does not then it means that the Vista partition GUID got changed. I think we've ruled out a change caused by relocating the partition to 63-sector offset because you had that offset to begin with and you're restoring to the same location, and the BCD does boot Vista. That leaves only my hypothetical "TI 11 is monkeying around with something to avoid a BCD repair" theory. It must force a GUID change and then copy this change to the BCD but leave the registry's MountedDevices key alone.

If so this is another bad idea on the order of the way TI 10 changes locations in the partition table in order to avoid the need to edit boot.ini for Windows XP. I note that Acronis fixed this in TI 11. Perhaps they will rethink the Vista algorithm and fix it in TI 12.

I can understand wanting to stick with Ghost because it just works for you. However, if you ever want to restore your Vista partition with TI then this procedure should do it:

1. Boot to VistaPE. Start DD 10 and hide the XP partition.
2. Start TI and restore the Vista partition.
3. Reboot the machine into Vista
4. Confirm that Vista restored properly, then start DD 10 in Vista.
5. Unhide the XP partition

I'm fairly certain that this will work for you.

 

In doing it this way, you are also "repeating" the problem. You are taking a system that works (your Ghost image) and creating a TI Full Disk Image backup. Then just restoring the Vista partition. You should get the same results every time.

I think this should work too. Another option is to boot into Vista and let it fail, then fix the MountedDevices entry in the Registry to point to the correct partition.

I haven't run a lot of tests on this, but from reading posts and what I have done, TI does not handle multi-boot BCD systems very well. You're lucky if one of them boots.

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Earthling,

If you really want to test TI on the Vista Logical partition restore, you need to do the restore, fix it and then create a new Entire Disk Image. Then restore that (or the partition from it) and see if you still have the problem. If it's consistent with how TI normally works, once you've fixed the problem further restores work okay.

 

Mark:

I couldn't just let that go after all your efforts!

It sort of worked. Vista did restore with the letter C, but XP moved from D to G and anything pointing at E, F, or G was then pointing in the wrong place. Of course I could fix all that with Disk Management, but overall it's a lot less faff just to do it in Ghost.

Makes me wonder if there aren't quite a few users out there religiously doing their backups but not actually having proved that they would restore correctly if they had to. Not really advocating they try it either - unless they've got another backup system they can use to rescue themselves if it goes pear shaped.

 

Well, well ... this is getting really interesting.

Paul, I think Earthling did follow your advice and, once having a correctly functioning dual-boot setup, did create an image and restore from the new image.

Earthling, there is another clue in your last post when you said that all of the other drive letters as seen by Vista had changed. What that means is that all of the partition GUIDs changed. The only thing I can think of as a cause is that the entire DiskID (in sector 0) changed. Is that how TI 11 "monkeys" with the GUIDs, by forcing them all to be reassigned?

If so, that sure isn't going to play well with a multiboot setup because it will cause a whole bunch of drive letter reassignments.

 

MudCrab:

I don't doubt there are ways of getting ATI to work in this situation, but they are tortuous, slow, and - to me anyhow - unpredictable. I do need something I can absolutely rely upon, and at present that can only be Ghost.

 

Mark:

That is exactly what happened. When running normally this system has either XP or Vista on C, depending on which was booted to, with the other on D. Partitions E, F, an G are data partitions on the same disk.

After using your suggested method XP went up to G, and the old E, F, and G all dropped down one. So shortcuts, Favourites, Documents etc were all pointing incorrectly.

I've just done a final restore of my Ghost image of Vista, it's fine, and I ain't mucking about with any of this stuff any longer

 

Earthling:

Thank you for being a willing guinea pig. I've learned a lot.

For anyone who reads this and is setting up a multiboot PC - set it up so that each OS is hidden from the others. You won't regret it and will avoid a lot of these issues.

 

Me too