Hide Vista from XP to protect System Restore

Terry60

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
Followed the instructions in your thread http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/hide-vista-partition-from-xp/.

XP boots fine with the Vista drives hidden as desired, but then Vista will not boot from its own bootloader, but fails (unable to find autochk) because Vista is still hidden even from its own bootloader.

The only solution is to reboot via the Neogrub bootloader "XP - Unhide Vista" option which of course immediately destroys Vista's restore points, thus negating the point of the whole exercise.

I only need a rudimentary XP installation to provide the TV capture support for my ATi All-in-Wonder GT X800 graphics card, because Vista/ATi refuse to support the multimedia function of the card.

All of the rest of my work is on the Vista system, so I don't want my system restore zeroed every time I use the TV.

Is there some reason your system still boots from the Vista bootloader and mine won't while the XP system has hidden the Vista partitions?

The HDD configuration is

500Gb SATA
C:Vista 25Gb primary| D:XP 10Gb primary| L:10Gb primary(future Linux) |E:User Apps 30Gb Logical | F:User Data 400Gb Logical

120 Gb IDE
G:Backup Primary

The partitions are in the above sequence on the disk and the drive letters are mapped identically on the two systems, though C and E appear "unavailable" in XP when hidden of course. (they're the two drives Vista creates recovery points for)

Is it the order of the system partitions which makes your installation work and mine fail ?

I see from reading other threads that you are working on a better way of setting this up that will allow the use of just a single level boot process, but in the meantime, what do I need to change at the end of menu.lst to get the "unhide Vista" option to go directly to the Vista boot after unhiding, instead of back into the deadly XP ?

Or is there an even better way to put another option in the top level bootloader e.g.
(Unhide) Vista
XP (hide Vista)
 
Thanks Guru - not an elegant solution - but it WORKS.

Sorry I didn't spot the thread, it's title didn't seem relevant, but I see now it was exactly my problem, and the minor menu.lst change did the trick.

I've made a contribution to your chip in fund in grateful thanks, mainly from my wife who's been fed up with the mess of two PCs strewn around waiting for a resolution to this problem (the last of many in converting to Vista !)
 
Thanks for the donation, Terry - much appreciated.

Expect to see EasyBCD 1.7.1 released tomorrow, and the other one-click System Restore fix possibly by the end of the week.
 
Only NeoGrub menu

Terry60

I had the same problem (one Vista and two XP) and I found a solution elsewhere on the web.
I tried it with easybcd and it worked wonderfull.
The explanation can be found in this web at :
http://neosmart.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1097

Guru's relase 2 will solve this in allmost the same way but meanwhile you can do the following :
What you have to do is very simple

1) create a menu.lst with the following contents and place it in the root of C:

default 0
timeout 30

title Windows Vista
unhide (hd0,0) #The Vista drive
find --set-root /Vistamgr
chainloader /Vistamgr

title Windows XP
hide (hd0,0) #The Vista drive
find --set-root /ntldr
chainloader /ntldr

2) Rename c:\bootmgr to c:\vistamgr

3) rename c:\neogrub to c:\bootmgr

From that moment you will only see the neogub menu which boots immediatly to Vista or XP
For security reasons you can create a Vista boot diskette or take some extra copies elsewhere
 
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