How to keep Vista retore points when dual booting Vista and XP

I set up my 2370 to dual boot vista and xp and everything works fine except when you boot into XP, you loose all your Vista restore points. This is a known issue and I have found instructions for hiding Vista from XP on another forum to keep XP from deleting the Vista retore points. However, I'm a little confused about how to label the drives and partitions and some people created big problems by labeling the wrong.

With XP installed, I created two partitions on my hard drive C. I installed Vista on the second partition. When booted into XP, the boot drive is C and the Vista drive is D. When booted into Vista, the lettering reverses. That's what it's suppose to do.

The instructions for hiding Vista from XP says to use EasyBCD and neogrub. To do so you have to label the hard drive and partition using numbers. It seems straight forward, but after reading the documentation and then the comments section, they seemed to contradict each other.

So my question is how do I correctly label the hard drive and partitions?

My first thought was they should be labeled as follows:

XP = hd0, 1 (hard drive 0, partition 1)

Vista = hd0, 2 (hard drive 0, partition 2)

But some of the comments and post imply that they should be labeled:

XP = hd0, 0 (hard drive 0, partition 0)

Vista = hd0, 1 (hard drive 0, partition 0)

So I am confused. Does anyone know which labeling is correct?


Instruction for Dual Booting XP + Vista: http://apcmag.com/5023/dual_booting_xp_with_vista

Instructions for hiding Vista from Xp: http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/hide-vista-partition-from-xp/

Instructions for labeling drive and partitions: http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Drive+Letters+and+Numbers

NOTE: Here is a quote from the link above about labeling the drives/partitions

"On Windows (and therefore, in EasyBCD as well… for the most part), drives start counting at 0, but partitions start from 1! So drive 0, partition 2 is the second partition of the first hard drive. Drive 3 partition 1 is the first partition of the fourth drive, and so on and so forth.

This may seem a bit off at first, but there's a good reason for this. In Windows, you can access the MBR (something EasyBCD does quite often) of each drive by setting the partition equal to zero. So drive 0 partition 0 is actually the MBR of the first hard drive. However, when dealing with EasyBCD and most other Windows programs, you will never reference the MBR, so just remember that drives start from 0 and partitions from 1. Even in boot.ini."

This is the code they use in neogrub to hide vista from xp

# NeoSmart NeoGrub Bootloader Configuration File
#
# This is the NeoGrub menu.lst file, and should be located at C:\\menu.lst
# Please see the EasyBCD Documentation for information on how to create/modify entries
# http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD

default 0
timeout 0

title Boot XP - Hide Vista
hide (hd0,1) # SET THIS TO THE VISTA DRIVE
# Optionally repeat the above entry for all the Vista drives
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr # SET THIS TO THE BOOT PARTITION
boot

# Optional section
# If you include this section, you will see a second bootloader menu!
title Boot XP - Unhide Vista
unhide (hd0,1) # SET THIS TO THE VISTA DRIVE
# Optionally repeat the above entry for all the Vista drives
chainloader (hd0,0)/ntldr # SET THIS TO THE BOOT PARTITION
boot

 

Yeah, I have a subscription to PC Magazine too.

It was either the August or the July issue, two of the last 20 pages.

 

Thanks, I found that articles but it just mentions the problem without giving a work-around or solution. The article I found gives a work around.

I'm just confused about how to label (number) my one hard drive with two partitions.

XP was installed first on the first partition and vista on the second partition.

Should the hd/partitions be labeled:

hd0,0 and hd0, 1

or

hd0, 1 and hd0, 2