dual booting woes.. you are not alone!

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Jay Smith
  • Start date Start date
What do you expect? It's Microsoft. As a matter of fact, unless I'm mistaken,
the XP eula states that no non-microsoft OS may reside on the same disk as
the installed OS. MS just hates that people may dare think of using Linux on
the same hardware that Win uses..., god forbid. I remember a couple months
back, MS launched this huge campaign declaring Linux server OS'es to be
highly inferior, and to "Get the Facts" before migrating.

As the article states, people use Win because they have to, not because they
want to. When MS controls (by sheer size of market) the software industry,
how can you switch? Most productivity files are MS Office based, MS put a
stranglehold over the PC gaming arena, most cooperate networks are Win-based
(though they are getting pissed). I would happly switch, if the world and
market wasn't so Win-based.
 
You know, I've posted this at least ten times now:

When you install another O/S to a system, hide the drives/partitions of the
existing O/S's. Is this concept of mine so difficult or esoteric that I am
the only one who does this?
 
and how can the linux bootloader for example include the other os if it cant
see it?
 
You know, I've posted this at least ten times now:

When you install another O/S to a system, hide the drives/partitions of the
existing O/S's. Is this concept of mine so difficult or esoteric that I am
the only one who does this?


I agree 100% - it worked for me Mark.
 
And where in the EULA does it say that?

M@dhat3rr said:
What do you expect? It's Microsoft. As a matter of fact, unless I'm
mistaken,
the XP eula states that no non-microsoft OS may reside on the same disk as
the installed OS. MS just hates that people may dare think of using Linux
on
the same hardware that Win uses..., god forbid. I remember a couple months
back, MS launched this huge campaign declaring Linux server OS'es to be
highly inferior, and to "Get the Facts" before migrating.

As the article states, people use Win because they have to, not because
they
want to. When MS controls (by sheer size of market) the software industry,
how can you switch? Most productivity files are MS Office based, MS put a
stranglehold over the PC gaming arena, most cooperate networks are
Win-based
(though they are getting pissed). I would happly switch, if the world and
market wasn't so Win-based.
Click to expand...
 
Follow along with Colin and keep the O/s's hidden from each other, as I do,
or unhide the partitions after the installation. BTW, keeping the O/S's
hidden after the installation "solves" the volsnap.sys interference between
XP and Vista.

The bootloader should reside on a separate partition anyway, and ideally
should be the only visible partition at system boot, if you keep them
separate.
 
When you install another O/S to a system, hide the drives/partitions ofexisting O/S's. Is this concept of mine so difficult or esoteric that I am
the only one who does this?

Mark:

I have never had to do that when using multiple MS op systems on the same
computer.

At one point I had all of the following on a single computer:
Win98 SE
NTWS 4.0
Win2k
XP Pro
XP Home
Win3k2 server (using AD)
SmallBusiness server 2003
 
You never had a VSS driver wipe out all your system restore points, shadow
copies, and previous versions of files on Vista before either, but that is
what will happen every time you boot into XP if XP can see your Vista
volume.

XP visible to Vista is not a problem, but Vista visible to XP sure is. This
was not an issue in previous versions of Windows because previous versions
did not have features based on VSS. Now we have two versions of Windows
that do have VSS and the VSS drivers in each are incompatible. There is
plenty about this earlier in this ng.
 
Re: Vol Shadow Copy Service and dual booting Win XP and Vista

Colin:

Win2k3 server has the same issue:
From:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...roddocs/entserver/best_practices_snapshot.asp

"Do not enable shadow copies on dual-booting computers.
.. If you have enabled dual-booting into previous versions of Windows (such
as Windows NT 4.0), the shadow copies which persist while restarting the
older version might be corrupted and unusable when the computer is started
again with Windows Server 2003. "

In a test situation, I find it useful/economical to run XP, Vista, and
Win2k3 server on the same computer (as I am on this computer). Yes, there
is a loss of some functionality, but it can be done, and it is very stable.
 
Of course it can be done. I do it with XP Pro x64 and both Vistas on my
test box. But test environment or not, the loss of shadow copies is not a
sign of stability to me, especially on a server.

Obviously, one never multiboots a server with anything in a production
environment (after all, the idea of a server is an always-on concept in the
first place) so it is more of an issue with clients. Fortunately, fewer
than one tenth of 1% of clients are multibooting anyway, which I'm sure is
why MS isn't going to do the extensive rewrite to XP needed to fix the
problem.
 
Colin said:
Of course it can be done. I do it with XP Pro x64 and both Vistas on my
test box. But test environment or not, the loss of shadow copies is not a
sign of stability to me, especially on a server.

Obviously, one never multiboots a server with anything in a production
environment (after all, the idea of a server is an always-on concept in the
first place) so it is more of an issue with clients. Fortunately, fewer
than one tenth of 1% of clients are multibooting anyway, which I'm sure is
why MS isn't going to do the extensive rewrite to XP needed to fix the
problem.
Click to expand...

Colin:

Yes, but both the NT/2000/XP and Vista (in a different way) support
multi-booting, and I find it quite incredible that MS did not foresee
this problem when they wrote System Restore for XP. How hard can it be
for an OS to recognize its own restore points and ignore others
(including ones from future operating systems)?

For me, the only solution to this mess is to use a 3rd party boot
manager which truly hides the OS's from each other, so that each
believes it is the only OS on the machine (and so always appears as the
C drive).

David Wilkinson

David Wilkinson
 
You do not understand the issue. It is not System Restore in Vista. System
Restore just happens to use the VSS driver, volsnap.sys, to get the snapshot
it uses when setting a restore point. It is volsnap.sys in XP that is the
culprit. Please read the material already posted to this ng. Search on
"volsnap.sys". You are far from understanding why this is an issue peculiar
to Vista and XP in a dual boot scenario.
 
"one tenth of 1% of clients are multibooting"

I find that hard to believe. Link?

I believe because of the hardware requirements of
Vista, you will see *many* more dual booters who
will want to see how Vista works on their system.
They will not want to get rid of XP, XP Pro is a fine
OS, but they would be willing to put Vista on a
separate partition.

With the upcoming RC1, I absolutely believe the number
of dual boot configurations will jump exponentially.

-Michael
 
I understand the issue thoroughly. I understand that
Microsoft produced an OS that can not keep its "hands"
to itself. Microsoft, also, does not provide nearly enough
warning to users that this major malfunction even exists.

-Michael
 
Colin said:
You do not understand the issue. It is not System Restore in Vista. System
Restore just happens to use the VSS driver, volsnap.sys, to get the snapshot
it uses when setting a restore point. It is volsnap.sys in XP that is the
culprit. Please read the material already posted to this ng. Search on
"volsnap.sys". You are far from understanding why this is an issue peculiar
to Vista and XP in a dual boot scenario.
Click to expand...

Colin:

I think I do understand. The people who wrote System Restore in XP did
not foresee the inevitable fact that there would be a successor OS that
might be multi-booted with XP. The people who wrote XP screwed up.

David Wilkinson
 
From back in the day- even then, the importance of being able
to dual/multi boot was clearly understood. From the second
link, nwhite, discusses dual booting- but never once mentions
the incompatibility of XP and Vista, nor, mentions "hiding" Vista
from XP. This from "The official and authoritative resource on
Microsoft Windows Vista."

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/ntwrkstn/tips/ncccrtdu.mspx?mfr=true

Windows NT and Windows 95/98 represent a huge percentage of the desktop systems in most
corporate environments. The ability to configure a single machine for multiple operating
systems provides a cost-effective way of testing without breaking your budget. In this article,
we've shown the necessary steps for installing Windows 95/98 and Windows NT on the same
workstation. Next month, we'll finish configuring our test system by adding FAT32 and NTFS
formatted partitions.

http://blogs.technet.com/windowsvista/archive/2006/07/25/443428.aspx

Exercising the Dual-Boot Option with Windows Vista

I've noticed that there are many questions in the community about dual-booting Windows Vista.
This is a very common scenario at Microsoft and as such, I figured I'd walk you through our
typical dual-boot installation procedure via the corporate network. Many of my colleagues
choose to run both operating systems simultaneously (not me -- I'm all Windows Vista, all the
time) by partitioning their hard drives and running a separate OS on each partition. They do
this for a variety of reasons, but in many cases it's so they can test new builds of Windows
Vista while retaining Windows XP (or another OS) on another partition. This will allows them
the flexibility to perform build-to-build upgrades more easily while retaining the original OS
as an alternative should there be a blocking bug in the Windows Vista build.
 
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