Vista Complete PC Restore

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Guest

I have a dual-boot of Vista Business OEM and Windows XP Home. All is running
fine; can boot into either system. I bought Vista Business for the complete
image backup feature because it worked well in the beta versions of Vista.

I was able to do complete restores of backups with the beta version. I have
made complete backups of my 80G drive that has XP and Vista installed, but
hadn't tried to do a restore of the drive until several days ago when the
windows defender (WD) updates wouldn't install. When the WD update did
install, I was going to restore from a backup that I made several days
earlier to clean up the failed updates.

My problem is: I can't boot from the Vista Business OEM DVD now. It loads
the windows files, shows a short windows loading screen with the moving dots,
then goes to the vista aqua screen with lights screen, and then does nothing
but show the mouse arrow. Does this have to do with it being an OEM disk and
the dual boot with XP and Vista already loaded? At first I thought maybe the
OEM disk didn't support complete pc recovery, but it won't even boot?

My PC is a Dell D9150 that came loaded with XP Home. I read somewhere that
Vista setup disks can have problems booting from some OEM MBRs. I also just
read that XP wipes out Vista restore points and prevents complete pc restores?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance!
 
Update. I finally just formatted the Vista partition and then tried to boot
off the Vista OEM DVD; it worked. I was able to boot up, select the Repair
menu, and restore the complete backup of the 80G hard drive with both XP and
Vista.

Does anyone know why I couldn't boot off the Vista DVD disk when the Vista
system was intact?

Thanks!
 
It might have been a small glitch in the software itself.. I have had this
happen in XP.. You may never have it happen again...
 
Thanks! Maybe you're right. I just booted off the DVD without any problems.
The only thing that I may have done different this time was create a restore
point before I restarted the PC to boot off the DVD.
 
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