Re: Dual boot with Vista = no System Restore?


"Ike" <binarydotike@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4636c244$0$8960$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
New laptop with 120GB hard drive and Vista Premium.

I've been planning to set up Linux - possibly Ubuntu - but someone just
told me that if I dual boot I lose Windows System Restore.

Is that true? Is there a workaround?

quick answer, no and yes

It really depends on how the machine does the system restore.

Here, I am working with an acer 5101 laptop. Their method is to have a small
(about 4 gig) restore partition at the start of the hard drive. Knoppix
recognizes this as hda1, but the mbr is set to boot from the seond
partition, so the first is never seen by windows. It wasn't until I booted
from the knoppix disk that I knew it was there.Then there are two equal
fat32 partitions, 'c' and 'd'.
Mandriva installed itself nicely, by shrinking the 'd' drive and making hda6
on the 4th partition, and so on. When I put lilo on the mbr, it recognized
the rescue partition and the 'c' drive as bootable and put them both on the
menu. When I used 'rescue' mode from the mandriva install dvd, it restored
the acer mbr, and the system works just as it did before. You can work with
the windows boot manager file so you don't have to install your own mbr, but
at the time that process was too complicated for me.
(actually only about 6 steps, none of then really difficult)

Now some other considerations. Acer uses a special alt-f10 combination, and
some windows code, at powerup to get into the rescue partition. I believe
that when it restores the 'c' drive to normal, it will also rewrite the mbr,
so you might have to re-write it. Fortunately, the rescue process does not
touch the 'd' drive, but it MAY rewrite the partition table in the mbr, so
you may lose the linux partitions. I need the machine for the next few
weels, so I can't afford to test that right now.

This machine nags you until you do an initial total 'c' drive backup to dvd,
and I have not tried a restore from dvd to see what gets overwritten.

I know that vista is hostile towards linux, but I don't see MS doing much
with the boot manager sequence between xp and vista.

It should work - try it on a brand new machine, if it totally screws up,
re-format 'c' with a retail xp cd and return for warranty service. There is
no warranty exclusion about installing 'software'.

A note in passing - the sound card and the wireless card do not auto
configure on this unit.

Stuart




.

Relevant Pages
Loading