Dual boot Vista beta

Hello, first off I want to say how much I love Acronis True Image and Disk Director Suite. I talk them up all the time at forums. I have made several disk images of operating systems on different partitians and have restored with no problems, I then made a image drive of Vista beta 5219 and saved to another partition with no problem. After deleting my Vista NTFS partition I went back to a single boot XP partition. All good so far! When I recently went to restore my Vista partition and I tried to reboot into Vista it wouldn't allow me to do so as there isn't a boot.ini option for Vista. I edited the boot.ini after installing Vista back onto a seperate partition, however I still couldn't boot into Vista. It would be great if in future version of Acronis True Image it could incorporate options for setting up boot.ini in Vista. The only way I can get Vista to boot back up is to reinstall Vista and then replace the Vista drive image back to the partition where I re-installed Vista. ? I was hoping there was an easier way to get Vista up and running. Thanks.

 

Hello clivebrkr52,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software and Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

Could you please do the following?

- Download the Acronis Report utility from http://www.acronis.com/files/support/AcronisReport.exe;
- Run Acronis Report utility and select the "Create bootable floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the floppy drive and proceed with creating the bootable diskette;
- Boot the computer under consideration from this diskette and wait for report creation process to complete;
- Send the 'report.txt' file from the floppy disk to Acronis Support along with the link to this thread. We will certainly find a way to help you with the problem.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

Will Acronis attempt to integrate a dual boot option for vista when restoring a Vista OS image in a dual boot with XP. The Vista retail operating system will be available by the end of 2006. More and more people are dual booting operating systems these days with such large hard drive capacity. Vista doesn't use a typical boot.ini with the latest 5270 build but a bootmanager? (No clue how it works). Please keep us posted regarding your developement!

 

Hello ronandex,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Your collaboration on this matter is very much appreciated.

The support for Windows Vista will certainly be implemented in the future versions of Acronis True Image, but exact time frame for this is not decided yet.

I would also like to mention that in order to be able to restore the multiboot system (system that uses a boot manager) to a working state you should restore the image of the entire hard drive, since only the image of the entire hard drive contains MBR (where boot managers are usually installed to).

You can find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide.

If you have any further questions please feel free to ask.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

I read from this pdf file that there is not support for Vista at this time. Concerning recoverying the MBR from the "Entire" hard drive. I have restored my Vista OS "entire" drive image, but when booting up it doesn't recognize or find the boot.in. The Vista OS is restored to its own partitian and drive, but why can't it recovery the boot option?

 

boot.ini has nothing to do with TI.
It could be that the XP boot loader knows nothing about Vista, and/or perhaps the Vista beta is not set up for dual booting.

Usually, it is necessary to instal the oldest OS first, then install the newer OS in a separate partition.

If you do that, does boot.ini have an entry for Vista?
If not you are outta luck.

 

Hello ronandex,

I'm afraid that I'm not eligible to provide you with the further information on backing up and restoring Windows Vista, since, as I have already mentioned above, it is not supported yet.

Please also note that we will certainly investigate any problems you have encountered with backing up and restoring Windows Vista as soon as the support for this version of Windows will be implemented and the corresponding build or version of Acronis True Image will be released.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Time to bring this topic back up.

I recognize that Vista is still not officially supported in ATI but I am testing Windows Vista along with Acronis TI beta 10 and hoping I can get some guidance before I try something.

I currently have two Vista boot partitions. One holds Vista beta 2 and the other RC1. There is no other OS partion, such as XP or Linux, so no boot.ini record, just the new Vista boot loader.

Does anyone know if Vista's boot loader will still work if I move a boot partition? Or how to repair it if it does not?

My test system currently has one hard drive, partitioned as follows:

80GB Vista Beta 2 boot
76GB primary data
41GB Vista RC 1 boot
21GB unallocated
14GB primary data

Ideally I would like to replace the contents of the first (beta 2) boot partition with the contents of the RC1 boot partion.

My plan is to copy the image of the RC1 partition onto the partition location now hosting the Beta 2 and then, once I am sure I can boot RC1 at it's new location, to install RC1 x64 for testing on the smaller partition where RC1 x86 was originally located.

My concern is whether I will fatally confuse the Vista boot loader if I write an image of the RC1 partition over the Beta 2 partition.

Will this work? I have NeoSmart EasyBCD installed on the RC1 partition to reconfigure things if necessary, after I reboot following the move. My main concern is whether I will at least be able to boot into RC1 or, if not, how to use the Vista RC1 boot DVD to repair the boot loader to fix the problem.

Or is there a better way?

 

I have three primary partions and one logical on my first HD.
they contain
XP SP2
Vista RC1 X86
XP SP2 (Test)

The logical is broken into multiple partitions one of which holds my TI Image files.

I multi boot using System Commander which is installed in the first XP partition.

I have sucessfully created images of VISTA RC1 X86 and restored it after a flawed VISTA 64 install attempt. The boot.ini files in partition 1 and 3 are unique to their respective XP systems and are not used to boot into other OSes.

I have had no problem Imaging and restoring any of these partitions.

Len

 

I have had no problems imaging and restoring a Vista primary partition to the same location either.

My question is more complicated: how to safely and effectively move a Vista multiboot partition to another physical partition on the same hard drive. Please bear in mind that the Vista boot loader works differently than the boot.ini used by a system originally set up with XP. I am trying to find out if anyone has some experience or advice regarding relocating the contents of a partition on a hard drive which is using the Vista boot loader exclusively.

 

PennHaven,

Take a look at BootVista Pro
http://www.vistabootpro.org/

I'm not sure it will help you, but it looks interesting.

Len

 

Len.
Thanks I just downloaded BootVistaPro the other day. It's functionality is very similar to NeoSmart EasyBCD, but BootVista Pro's user interface does seem to be somewhat better designed. My only concern is that it is necessary to have at least one functioning boot partition to make any repairs with either of these utilities. So even though I will definitely have these utilities available when I get ready to overwrite one of my boot partitions, if I somehow totally screw up the boot loader I may still be out of luck. Ideally there should be a boot loader editor/repair utility like this that can be run from a bootable CD or floppy.
--John

 

Well I was able to copy an image of one Vista boot partition over another and get both of them to boot into Vista. But unfortunately getting Vista to work properly after relocating a boot partition apparently is more complicated than that.

After copying the image of the partition I wanted to move (an extended partition) over the the primary boot partition location, I had to run a startup repair from the Vista DVD in order to reestablish the Vista Boot Loader. That at least provided me with the ability to boot using either partition.

The problem was that when booting from the relocated partition Vista was apparently confused about its location. It still treated the original extended partition as "C:" while labling its new actual active partition location as "D:" Furthermore Vista still needed to access information on the original extended partition. When I tried disabling that partion with the table editor utility from Partition Magic Vista would still boot from the new location but only partially. It was unable to load its Desktop or any applications, apparently unable to find them. i.e., It was non-functional.

So I believe that there is partition ID info stored in the Vista registry that would need to be modified whenever moving a boot partition to a new location.

How to do this I don't know. Ideally the registry would be edited by booting from a CD/DVD/floppy, but with what utility? Or theoretically it could be done by booting into Vista on the other partition, but then I do not know how Regedit could be tricked to edit the registry of the other boot partition.

Maybe someone here with more knowledge has a suggestion?

 

Windows XP exhibits similar behavior...storing critical boot info on the original disk or partition, even after moving the OS to a new bootable location. I suspect this is part of Microsoft's strategy to prevent pirated software.

Many in this forum suggest disconnecting the original bootable drive when first booting the restored XP drive, so that XP sees only the single instance, and thus retains autonomy. As to whether this will work with Vista, or the Boot loader you are trying, I have no idea.

Regards

 

Thanks much. It sounds like it could be worth a try. When I have some more time to possibly waste again LOL I can try disabling the original partition before the first startup with the overwritten partition and then perhaps Vista will be forced to reorient itself during the initial boot. If it works it will save me considerable time in the long run compared to reinstalling everything on the primary partition.

 

Well I got it work. I moved the contents of the extended boot partition to the location of the original primary active boot partition and, with some registry edits, was able to get Vista to boot from the new location and work correctly.

First I booted from my Partition Magic rescue disk and used the partition table editor utility to change the partition type of the extended partition I no longer wanted Vista to see to "hidden". I don't think this actually made any difference, but it didn't hurt.

Next I used the ATI rescue CD to restore the extended boot partition image over the primary boot partition and make it active.

Vista would not load after this, so I had to run two passes of System Repair from the Vista DVD.

This enabled Vista to boot and partially load, but as with my previous attempt, Vista could not load it's desktop or any applications, because it could no longer find the disk volume it thought they were on.

Fortunately the Task Manager could still be loaded from the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu screen and from there I was able to run Regedit.

After some searching of the registry I found the MountedDevices key entries and, as expected, they still showed all of the volumes and drive assignments unchanged from the original setup before the boot partition was relocated.

After studying these entries for awhile it became clear that there are two sections, one listing the mounted volumes (partitions) and assigning them ID values and the other associating the drive letters with the physical volumes by means of the ID values.

First step was to delete the entry for the volume associated with C: (After noting its ID data values.) This was actually the old (now hidden) extended partition. (This step may not even be necessary.)

Then I changed the C: drive assignment to the ID values for the volume still associated with the D: drive (but now actually the active primary boot volume or "new" C: ), and finally I deleted the drive assignment entry for the D: drive.

Exited regedit. Exited Task Manager. Restarted from the Shutdown button at the lower right corner of whatever the menu screen is now called when you Ctrl-Alt-Del from Vista.

Vista rebooted cleanly, no longer confused about where it's C: drive actually was. Success!

This is not really difficult to do once you know what must be done, but it sure took me a lot of time and effort to figure it out. I hope posting this will help someone else.

\\\\\

 

Administrators:

Why did Ronjor edit my last post? And why am I no longer able to edit it myself? There are some typos I would like to correct.