WinXP Deleting W7 Restore Points

[Mantrid-Drone]

This is an old problem with dual boot W7 and XP. XP has a habit of seeing W7 restore points as corrupt and deletes them.

I didn't expect to have this problem when I installed both system completely separately ie. W7 Pro (64) on SSD and WinXP Pro on a HDD on the same PC. Each was disconnected entirely during the install and only saw each other once everything was set up. The secondary OS (XP) is booted when required via the the BIOS.

Problem is that even here WinXP is deleting the W7 restore points.

How to stop it:-

Well I followed an apparently authoritative tutorial and did a manual registry edit when using XP to add an "Offline" key to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MountedDevices with DWORD values for the two W7 drives ie. the SSD and the 1TB HDD I'm using exclusively with W7. The source of this tutorial is on another forum so I haven't posted it here but it is easily found.

Problem is it didn't work. I am the only account on the machine so must be running as admin to able to even access the registry. I'd swear on oath that it was exactly as shown in the tutorial. After reboot or shutdown/restart the registry still showed the new Offline key and correct values for the two correctly identified W7 drives but in My Computer they were still being shown.

I redid it three times with the same result.

It's my understanding that they shouldn't be appearing in My Computer at all. Maybe this is wrong but that doesn't make sense. XP is not supposed to be seeing the SSD and 1TB HDD at all is it? How would you know whether they were or were not "Offline".

I restored the pre-edit registry backup and tried a simpler solution: using Computer Management and disabling those devices from there. It worked as far as My Computer was concerned. The two drives are not shown iat all but whether this far simpler solution stops XP deleting W7 restore points I haven't yet tested.

Any theories about why the registry edit might not have worked?

 

[Mantrid-Drone]

I just couldn't get this fixed. All the things I've tried still didn't stop the W7 restore points being deleted by WXP. The registry editing I did was fine, doing what it was supposed to do in taking the particular drives 'offline' but it was no solution.

Only suggestions I found but didn't try was a). turning off system restore points completely for WXP, certainly not the ideal solution even if it did work and b). encrypting the whole W7 OS drive. I didn't fancy that either.

Still interested in any other suggestions but since then I decided to make use of W7 Pro's XP Mode instead and Windows Virtual PC.

I won't bore people with the details but rather than use Windows Virtual PC I've ended up using an old VMWare Player version v6 ie. not the more recent VMWare Workstation which requires an extra component just to allow XP Mode to work and full registration details just to get it.

One tip that may be of help to any others still thinking of using VMs themselves for any purpose not just W7/WXP is DO NOT USE AVAST anti-virus. It has a virtualization module that is on by default and will interfere with the setting up of a VM unless you turn it off.

The MS HAV Tool used to pre-check systems can run virtualization technology will report negatively if that AVAST module (Settings > Troubleshooting > Enable hardware-assisted virtualization) isn't disabled.

On top of this once the Guest OS is working if AVAST is installed as its anti-virus it is the alleged cause of a range of other serious problems even with the virtualization module disabled.

 

[marlinman]

I used BootIt NG when I wanted way back to dual boot XP and 7 (or was it Vista?) and have the OSes hidden from one another. It's nagware tho' and will end up adding a minute to boot time unless you pay for it. My recent experiments with dual booting 7 and 10 without partition hiding seem to have caused instability with 10, so think I'm gonna also try EasyBCD, which seems to offer same functionality for free(?)