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The reason why a Dual boot system with Vista loses it's Restore Points.

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oldfogy:
For the last few days I could not understand why with my Vista/XP duel boot system Vista keeps losing all of it's Restore Points.
I just put it down to a fault of some sort, but I just came across this article which is very enlightening to say the least and explains WHY.

This is part of it: Go to "Item number 10"

Dual boot system and losing your Restore Points ?

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

Quote:
The problem:

Windows XP automounts every disk it detects, including external or removable hard disks.
As part of the automounting process, NTFS writes to the disk, and these writes are detected by the volsnap.sys driver in Windows XP.
Because this version of volsnap.sys does not recognize the persistent shadow copies (also known as restore points) made by the volsnap.sys driver in Windows Vista, Windows XP cannot maintain the integrity of the shadow copy storage area and deletes the shadow copies to avoid corrupting them.
Note that dual-booting Windows Vista with Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will also result in the shadow copies being deleted.

The impact:

When booting into Windows XP and automounting a disk, you will notice the following effects on the disk after booting back to Windows Vista:

All restore points are deleted from the disk.
All previous versions of files are deleted from the disk.
All but the most recent CompletePC Backups are deleted from the disk. The remaining backup made by CompletePC Backup is full and complete and can be used to restore your entire computer.
File backups are not affected because these backups do not rely on restore points.

End Quote:

Pwiggler:
that interesting OF, cheers for that  :)

oldfogy:
Actually I just spotted something else, although nothing to do with the quote above persae.


--- Quote ---
As part of the automounting process, NTFS writes to the disk


--- End quote ---
I wonder if this is why when there a recovery files on  anew PC they are always mounted on a FAT32 Drive/Partition.

kitz:
Recovery drives tend to use FAT32 since DOS only works with FAT32 and not NTFS.
Many recovery tools are/were DOS based - and even Ghost up to relatively recent needed a FAT32 partition to store the images

oldfogy:
Both of my Medion PCs have/had the recovery partition as FAT32, which I never got around to finding out why.

I use Norton Ghost 2003 quite a lot, "even for Vista" with the image files stored on a NTFS partition and always boot from PC DOS on a floppy disc, although it has always worked quite well (3/4 failures in 10 years) would I benefit from FAT32 where the images are stored.
Or is it the old adage "it ain't broke" so don't fix it.

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