Dual Boot Imaging Woes

[Mercutio]

IIRC:
Make sure you shut off System Restore on both systems. They over write each other and are not compatable with each other. Makes a mess.
You will find that even though you installed Vista in the 'D' partition, that when running Vista and opening Windows Explorer, Vista will be in the 'C' partition. It automatically assigns itself to 'C' no matter where it is installed. Very confusing.

System restore is off. I've tried using Sysprep on both, just sysprep on Vista, ImageX (makes a .WIM file just like the install DVD), Straight cloning the drives using about five different methods (including three different versions of TrueImage).

What's happening is that I end up with either unbootable Vista or unbootable XP, or both, even from a straight-up sector copy. Usually the drive letters magically shift, on top of the boot files for Vista going away. With shifted drive letters, system folders are no longer in the right place and even if I get Vista working enough to give me task manager, none of the system apps will run and it won't create a profile.

The image is good for all the hardware I have, but that's a mix of IDE and SATA drives, older boards and newer ones. That part is right, at least. The whole setup is three partitions, commonly C: (XP), E: (Vista, becomes C: when Vista is running; the Vista partition was created after the XP installation and therefore was assigned that drive letter) and Z: (a common partition for image storage and so forth). C: and E: are primary partitions, Z: is a logical partition, which means it should be the last thing that gets assigned a drive letter.

If I just had to deal with XP, this would all be routine, but as things are, I have about 80 computers and it looks like, since everything else is stymied, that I'm going to have to install Vista + apps by hand on all of them since none of the Imaging programs I've tried are reacting properly with the dual boot setup.

 

[paugie]

auuggghhh! I would be freaking out of my mind. 80 PC's.

Now if you were being paid overtime...

 

[ddrueding]

Can you create an image and restore it to the exact same hardware? If not, forget having to do it 80 times to start with, you'll have to do it every time a machine takes a dump. That really sucks.

 

[Mercutio]

I am restoring to a PC that is identical but for the MAC address and maybe BIOS ID.

I've tried multiple drive imaging programs (TrueImage 9, 10 and 11, Ghost, DriveImage XML et al) and even rebuilt my image from scratch on a different drive; something ALWAYS fucks up.

 

[blakerwry]

Does imaging and restoring to a different drive work if you stay on the same system?

 

[mubs]

Shit. And this was something I was planning to do; fortunately haven't had the time so far. Or I'd probably have pulled the remaining few hairs out of my head.

 

[LunarMist]

I am restoring to a PC that is identical but for the MAC address and maybe BIOS ID.

I've tried multiple drive imaging programs (TrueImage 9, 10 and 11, Ghost, DriveImage XML et al) and even rebuilt my image from scratch on a different drive; something ALWAYS fucks up.

Is TI 11 any better or worse than TI 10? TI 10 does not exist any more.

 

[Chewy509]

Hi Merc,

I think your problem lays with wanting to dual boot, and Vista's new boot manager. (Vista doesn't use ntldr.exe anymore).

One option...
1. create a Vista image that resides on a primary partition.
2. create a WinXP image that also resides on a primary partition.

(You have two separate images)

Using TI,Ghost, etc, copy the Vista image to the HDD first (ensure the Vista boot manager is installed). Copy the WinXP image to another primary partition, but don't let Ghost/TI set the new XP partition as active.

Boot Vista and let it install. Once Vista is setup, add in the Windows XP image/partition as an option in the Vista Bootmgr, and boot up Windows XP. Once you have both Vista and XP working, create the data partition as needed.

I don't know if the process can be automated, but at least you won't have to install Vista+Apps 80 times.

 

[Mercutio]

Well Chewy, that did not work either, but I did ultimately figure out the problem and a couple different ways to solve it.

The issue *IS* in fact Vista's retarded boot manager, which is present on the C: drive even if Vista isn't part of the baseline image. It turns out that TrueImage and the other programs I was trying just could not resist making a change to the boot secot during what should have been a sector by sector clone operation.

The two ways I found around that were 1. Install GRUB, which works but is entirely too much extra work or 2. Image my working drive as a backup, rather than a clone operation. It turns out that "Clone" doesn't really mean clone to a couple of the programs I tried, it means: "Copy all my stuff and fuck with my boot sector while you're at it." Silly me, I hadn't realized there was a difference, possibly because I spent many hours doing things the wrong way and because that's the way I've *always* tested it.

For the record, if an XP/Vista dual boot gets hosed, there does not seem to be a way working with just Vista or XP to get both of them back; you can make XP work and it'll wipe Vista's boot sector, or you can make Vista work and it'll tell you that the XP startup files are corrupted thereafter.

TI11 is pretty much the same as TI10, except it adds an option to snapshot your computer before an application install so you can roll back the change. I thought it might handle Vista's version of NTFS better or something but it doesn't seem to.

I'm still interested in figuring out why Microsoft's ImageX system didn't work, since it's not a sector by sector copy but a file based image. It behaved in much the same way as the others, and left me with only one startable OS. I'd really like to use the Windows Deployment Service to push all these images out but I have to have working .WIM files first and I never got to the point where they could coexist.

 

[Bozo]

Also, Drive Image 11 still does not see Intels motherboard installed RAID when booting from the rescue disk. That sucks.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

I more strongly suspect that's the result of the Intel RAID you're using being a software or half-software sort of thing than a proper hardware one. TrueImage sees Windows Server softRAIDs as individual drives but arrays connected to hardware controllers (e.g. Dell PERC) as single volumes.

 

[Fushigi]

Unless you need full local hardware support, this sort of thing makes the case for running VMs instead of images. Run either OS as the native and run the other within a VM Player session. Or run either OS native and RDP to the other running on a separate VMWare server. If you're using Vista Ultimate use the MS VM system to run an XP VM.

 

[ddrueding]

Thinking about myself here (not the first time). Would there be a problem installing Vista on one drive and XP on another, then putting both in the same computer and controlling which to boot from via the BIOS?

 

[Bozo]

I more strongly suspect that's the result of the Intel RAID you're using being a software or half-software sort of thing than a proper hardware one. TrueImage sees Windows Server softRAIDs as individual drives but arrays connected to hardware controllers (e.g. Dell PERC) as single volumes.

The irritating part is that my 1999 version of Drive Image sees the Intel RAID controller just fine. It sees one large drive instead of the individual ones.

Bozo :joker:

 

[sechs]

The two ways I found around that were 1. Install GRUB, which works but is entirely too much extra work or 2. Image my working drive as a backup, rather than a clone operation. It turns out that "Clone" doesn't really mean clone to a couple of the programs I tried, it means: "Copy all my stuff and fuck with my boot sector while you're at it." Silly me, I hadn't realized there was a difference, possibly because I spent many hours doing things the wrong way and because that's the way I've *always* tested it.

So, were you including the boot sector in your images?

I don't know of any software that does this by default. Ghost (the real one, not the abomination) requires you to select the image boot option.