Hi.

I have, as some will know, a dual-boot XP Pro/Vista Ultimate test computer the idea being that it Folds in its spare time and is available for testing components in either or both Windows environments when necessary.

I always intended to keep the installations clean by only installing necessary software and imaging Windows to restore it to its clean state after testing.

Yesterday after testing some software in XP, I attempted to restore the XP image and required a restart. After this, I lost everything. The first error was "Cannot read from sector 0 of disk 0" but the restore process would start.Then it failed and the next error was BOOTMGR is missing. No joy fixing that one with either XP or Vista disc and, of course, the XP installation was gone! I booted using the True Image boot CD and got the message "Cannot read from sector 0 of disk 0" and that was that- nothing doing.

Long story short, I wiped the entire drive, installed both OS and using True Image in Vista, I mounted the XP image as a drive and managed to replace the complete XP files from the backup image to the XP partition saving me a lot of updating and configuring of my XP environment. XP now works fine.

Unfortunately, I hadn't realised that I had yet to image Vista, so I will have to start the configuration process from scratch.

Now, my questions are- WTF went wrong in the first place? and Will imaging the entire drive with three partitions (XP/Vista/data) into one file a. be possible b. work OK?

Thanks

I was using TI8 for XP, but I will use TI11 for Vista/entire drive. The images are stored on an external USB connected HDD

I think that was your problem. You need 10 or later to support Vista, plus your image was from before you installed it.

When you installed Vista, it would have changed the boot partition to give you the menu. When you restored your old XP image, it messed up the Vista boot manager.

I imaged the XP installation two hours earlier, before I installed the software I was testing but perhaps I could have restored XP by booting into Vista, rather than starting the restore operation from XP itself.

I was fortunate- with a dual-boot system that I was able to mount the XP image and restore Windows XP in all its glory but I have had to install all the Vista updates and stuff again and activate it again.

I have now imaged the entire drive so I don't see that there should be problems in the future.