Norton Ghost with XP and Vista dualboot

J

jfm

Member
Hello,

I have installed Vista on my XP preinstalled laptop. I made the Vista installation from XP and from Vista setup files located on a server (because the laptop could not see the Vista CD).

1. XP partition (NTFS, 10GB, main, active)
2. Data partition (NTFS, 50GB, logical)
3. Vista partition (NTFS, 17GB, main)

The Vista installation created un number of files and a boot folder on the XP partition.
A collegue who did the same on his laptop had a lot of problems (and ended reinstalling Vista) after restoring his XP partition with Ghost (I have Ghost old and new images from my partition as well).

My question is: Is there any way to restore properly and quickly the dualboot after restoring a partition with Ghost ?
Or is it possible to convert the standard Windows dual boot into an easier to ghost restore dual boot ?

Thank you for your help.
jfm
 
Hi jfm, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand your situation.
I understand the steps that you took, but not where they ended you up.

At the moment, what is exactly the problem? Does your Vista boot? XP?
 
Hi Computer Guru,

Sorry about my poor English…
At the moment both XP and Vista work fine on my laptop; but what will happen if I restore (with ghost) the XP partition (or worse, an image of it made before installing Vista) ? In the case the boot files are damaged or lost (after restoring) is it possible to repair or recreate them with EasyBCD ? And what about the MBR in case it is damaged (after a disk crash for example) ? I guess it's not enough just to restore the partitions...
My colleague (same computer/configuration) had serious problems after restoring his XP and Vista partitions on a new disk after a disk crash. I imagine that his problem came from the MBR that was not restored on the new disk. So is there any way to restore the MBR too ?

My second question is: is there an easy way to replace the standard Windows multi-boot (when already installed) for a third party multi-boot product such as BootMagic to avoid restore problems ?

jfm
 
OK, I see what you mean.

Do not use BootMagic! It's very buggy and especially with Windows Vista!

This is what you would do:
Restore the XP partition
Boot from the Vista DVD
Select "Repair"/"Startup Repair" -> Automated Startup Repair
Reboot

Everything will work fine.
 
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