Now that was a bad idea!

[AvengerUK]

A freind sent a me a Copy of vista, so i had to try it out!

Firstly, i hid my XP disks using Bootit NG, and made a seperate partition for vista. The vista install went well, although it told you even less than XP did...three dots at the most!

Anyway, it loaded fine. - Have to say, it handled extremely strangely to say the least...didnt like the new "feel" to things...

...then i saw that Vista had totally ignored my settings, and un-hid everything, and created its own boot manager. Great. - rebooted and deleted the vista partition, however it has left the boot manager behind...something ive now got to fix (although this seems pritty easy).


Typical windows  - Before i even think of installing it again, i must find a way to hide the disks!

Anyone got any ideas? Im not letting vista destroy my XP!!

[Rik]

I guess I would have started with an Acronis image before I did anything.

Could you use a 3rd party boot manager? 

[AvengerUK]

Thats what im using (Bootit NG) - but vista seems to be paying no attention to it (which is extremely strange)!

[Rik]

Come on, Avenger. MS software not paying attention to what you want, but trampling all over the place. They started doing that in v1 of Windows!! 

[AvengerUK]

True true!

[Odos]

I use BootIt NG as my boot manager and had no problems testing then removing Vista.

The way I did it was to image everything I didn't want Vista to play with on my boot drive ( i.e bootit and my assorted Windoze and Linux partitions ) then clear and format C: drive. Next install Vista and let it do it's thing. Once it's installed image Vista itself before re-formatting the boot drive and restoring all my good stuff and finally restoring the Vista image into the partiton of my choosing.

Doing it that way Vista had no choice but to obey what BootIt set up. One last thought, I use extened MBR's, don't know if that makes any difference to anything but good luck anyways 

Cheers
     Tony

[Odos]

With regards to my previous post above, after thinking about it, I believe using extended MBR's does make a difference. If you are using them you get an extra option in the boot menu just below the "Hide" option and that is "Clear". If you use this then all mention of the partition you want to make invisible is removed from the MBR so Vista or any other OS can't find it. The area of the drive platter where the partition is just appears as unallocated space until Bootit says otherwise.

Cheers
      Tony

[AvengerUK]

Thanks for the advice tony!

Ive got a day of waiting for the "city link man" today - so ill give it a try!

(and post back if it works )