Restore points are all gone in Vista?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wizard
  • Start date Start date
W

Wizard

I have a dual boot system with XP and Vista. Whenever I need a restore
point there is always just one, the most current. What's wrong here and
how do I fix it?
 
Hi Wizard--

1) Space considerations may impact. You didn't say how much space.

2) You gave minimal info. If you dual boot, the way to handle it is to
either protect the restore points on Vista if and when you boot to XP or
you'll lose them UNLESS

you take measures to protect them. One way is if you have a Vista edition
with Bit Locker encryption you can use it to protect Vista restore points
when you boot to XP.

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/07/14/441829.aspx

You can easily shortcut to XP from Vista's desktop:

XP Drive Letter\Documents and Settings\Wizard's Profile\Desktop

or from XP's desktop:

Vista Drive Letter\Users\Wizard's Profile\Desktop

You can drag a shortcut to the desktop from each of these folders with left
mouse from the upper left hand corner.

3) Much has been made of that here, but having used a dual boot with Vista
since the Beta started in July 05, I find I simply can shortcut to the XP
desktop when I need to access it and don't lose my restore points. You can
search for elegant explanations involving the volsnap.sys driver etc if you
want to see the reason. MSFT could have corrected this, but felt it wasn't
worth the trouble to backport to do it.

Without more information, I can only refer you to Jill Zoeller's blog with
articles on how system restore works in Vista.

4) 3rd party tools can impact restore points in Vista. I never saw them do
that in XP.

http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...rd-party-tools-can-affect-restore-points.aspx


Disk Space Needed for SR in Vista
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...used-for-restore-points-in-windows-vista.aspx

Beta Chat on System Restore
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/pages/447166.aspx

Good luck,

CH
 
This really is a known problem with dual booting XP and Vista. You are lucky
you have One restore point, I have never even had One! If you have Vista
Ultimate then use bitlocker encryption to solve the problem. If not then you
are going to loose the restore points. To be honest Microsoft know about it
and couldn't care. I bugged this issue all through the beta of Vista and the
simple reply was 'won't fix'.

An alternative is, rather than physically dual boot, use a virtual machine
instead. This means allows you to run both Vista and XP (assuming you have
enough memory) on the same partition at the same time. This is the method I
now use. Microsoft's own Virtual PC 2007 is available free (just Google
virtual pc 2007). One downside to VPC 2007 is that it has no USB support,
the last time I used it it also had no sound support for onboard sound. If
you need USB support, as I do because my USB printer doesn't work correctly
with Vista, you would need to look at VMWare WorkStation. Unfortunately, you
do have to pay for this one.


--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
Windows - Shell/User

Web: http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org
Web: http://vistasupport.mvps.org

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Wizard said:
I have a dual boot system with XP and Vista. Whenever I need a restore
point there is always just one, the most current. What's wrong here and
how do I fix it?
Click to expand...

This is a known issue. When booting into XP in dual boot scenario, if the
Vista partitions are visible to XP, it will delete all the Vista restore
points, shadow copies and some of the backups created in Visa. XP's
volsnap.sys doesn't recognize the Vista restore points, things there is a
problem and deletes them to protect the system.

Ways around this are to use Bitlocker and encrypt the Vista partition, or
use a 3rd party boot manager that can hide the Vista partitions from XP, or
install each OS on it's own drive or install a removable drive tray in a
spare drive bay, and switch switch drives when you boot.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/dualboot.html
 
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