marcella

I loaded Vista RC1 from its bootable dvd on a separate drive from my XP Pro. It "saw" my existing XP Pro and created its new, uneditable version of the old boot.ini file, giving me a boot up choice. I find that annoying, but could not get rid of it. Then I discovered VistaBootPro from ProNetworks. It allowed me to rework the menu the way I wanted it.

At about the same time, I was having great problems with Acronis TrueImage v. 9 and even 10. My old Drive Image was no longer supported, and acting flaky, so I had purchased Acronis. It made great images but failed to boot from its floppy or USB boot disks in order to restore them. It would get only so far, and then freeze. I believe the culprit might have been my sata dvd-writer, which mscdex etc. does not find. After numerous pieces of advice from Acronis, I gave up, asked for a refund, and have not heard from Acronis since.

I then found TeraByte's utilities. I can say they are a great way to image and restore that has never hiccupped. Image for Dos/Linux bypases the OS. It can even bypass the BIOS and go directly to the hard drives if necessary. Image for Windows runs within XP Pro, allowing me to continue work on other things, even if I am imaging XP! It has a special lockdown feature (Phylock) that captures the state when I start the image, and then ignores any open or changing files. IFD and IFW can read each others image files, too.

So, here is my new approach to having more than one OS. I get my XP setup just the way I want it. All apps are always installed under Program Files on C. All data is stored across partitions D through I which are on separate sata drives, never ever on C. I image my custom XP, saving it to another drive, using either IFD or IFW. I have one IDE drive that I restore that image to, creating a backup OS if needed (I did when fooling around with RAID). Being IDE, it is seen by the BIOS as HD0. HD1 is a Seagate 400gb sata II and is used exclusively for data. I have a 36gb Raptor as HD2, where I tested Vista RC1. It now awaits the "final" Vista. My working XP is on HD3, another 36gb Raptor.

After doing a clean install of RC1, it changed the dual boot menu which I then got rid of with VistaBootPro. I then used the Asus boot menu (F8) to pick HD0 (backup XP), HD3 (working XP) or HD2 (Vista RC1). I made sure my partition letters and naming were constant in all cases, so my data remains current and accessible by any OS. If I use my backup XP to send or receive Outlook 2003 email, for example, my mailbox.pst file will be in the same place when I boot into Vista or my working XP. My dvd/cd-rom is always Drive J, etc. so my OS finds it in the same place when I change device drivers, etc.

I also have images for XP in RAID0 from a previous use of both Raptors I can restoe if I decide to postpone Vista. They include, of course, all the nVidia RAID/IDE and SI drivers needed.

TeraByte also has BootiT NG. It too will do basic imaging, but also non-destructive partition resizing/sliding, etc., as well as boot managing. I ignore the latter as it just seems to complicate things. I no longer rely on old PowerQuest programs, or new Symantec and Acronis bloats and failures. TeraByte makes all this very easy and well-protected. You can get all these programs for $50 in total. DOS gurus can have a ball creating batch files for automated imaging, etc. Not my idea of fun.

When Vista comes, I will feel safe enough to convert my two Raptors back to RAID0 for Vista, create new images, and just keep my IDE XP drive for fallback as well as program compatibility (e.g. I'm NOT going to pay Intuit for a Vista-friendly version of my adequate Quickbooks Pro).

BTW, I also back up my images and data to two eSata drives. I live in hurricane country, and when we evacuate, I just grab the two eSatas.The Asus Crosshair has all the ports I need to run up to six internal and two external sata's. One day I'll get a small sata drive to replace my backup XP and be IDE free for more efficiant cooling.