Vista and TI 10

I am about to install Vista Ultimate on my second internal hard drive in a dual boot setup with XP Pro on my primary, c: drive.

I would like to back up Vista at different stages to an external drive as I get it set up the way I want it, so that I can eventually restore it as my primary os on c:

1. Once I've installed Vista, can I reboot into XP and use TI 10 to make a backup of d: with Vista on it, or should I install TI 10 on Vista right away in order to make the back up?

2. When I'm ready to make Vista my primary, c: os, will TI 10 "restore" Vista to c: as if it were a clean or new install to c:?

Thanks for any advice!

 

My advice would be to make sure that Vista gets installed completely on the D drive. If you install Vista by the default of just booting off the dvd, it will automatically take over the booting of your XP partition (and install its bootloader there). This will make the partitions linked and possible hamper your later attempts to move Vista to C. (I don't even know if you can move Vista from one drive to another. I haven't tried it yet.) This may be what you want, as I don't know what method of dual-booting you're planning on using.

You'll need to setup the partition for Vista, make it primary and active and then reboot and do the install. Vista should see the empty partition and use it, leaving your XP partition alone. If that doesn't work, you'll have to hide the partition and keep it hidden from Vista.

I didn't want to mess with any of those problems, so when I installed Vista, I cleared my hard drive, installed Vista, and then restored my two XP Pro dual boots back using TI.

As far as I know, Vista will install as C regardless of existing drive arrangements. Also, I've read that the upgrade version of Vista won't let you do a clean install. You can only use it to upgrade and existing XP installation.

 

Hello bornconfuzd,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please notice that MudCrab is right: Windows Vista doesn't like to be "moved around". If you go the way of just installing Windows Vista along with Windows XP, and then move Vista installation to another drive, you wil most likely have to fix the boot manager for it to work. If you go the way of hiding drives and setting an independent dual boot, you won't be able to image Windows Vista drive from within Windows XP, and vice versa. It will be possible to image both drives using Acronis Bootable Rescue Media, though.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

I just went through this. I installed Vista Home Premium along with my old XP installation as a dual-boot until I can get everything tested and working before I switch completely to Vista. Before the install, I had two partitions under XP - C for the OS and programs and D for temp and data files. When I did the install, I created a new partition and installed to it. Vista created a new C drive in the new partition and sees the old XP C drive as drive D and my second XP partition as E (it's an extended partition). The new D drive is shown to be the active system drive and the new C drive (Vista) is shown to be active only. Anyway ... I was able to boot to XP and image the Vista partition with TrueImage 8 while I was in the process of getting things set up. I've now upgraded to TI10 installed on Vista.