System Restore Doesn'T Work

I asked about this problem a while ago. I posted the error messages and the only solutions were to basically restore windows. Every bit of windows works perfectly and always has. I found out some interesting facts. Maybe I should have mentioned that I'm using a dual boot machine with Vista on the other partition. In the Vista help section I found the following: "I have an earlier version of Windows on my computer, but when I switch between versions, my restore points disappear. Why?
In this version of Windows, restore points are created differently and are not recognized by earlier versions of Windows. If you have a dual-boot configuration and you start an earlier version of Windows, the earlier version will delete any restore points created by this version of Windows. If you start this version of Windows, restore points will resume being created automatically." OK now I feel I'm on to something...How can I make System restore work in XP again?

 

work-around

The only work-around I found was hiding the restore points from XP. On the old Win2k server you could backup system files to any folder you wanted. I guess these days Windows wants to manage all that itself. Anyway, don't know if you can live with the Vista partition being hidden, but here's the article link:

http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2007/04/16/dual-boot-xp-and-vista-fix-system-restore-to-keep-restore-points-in-vista/

 

Have you tried this fix, or have you just located this article...comments were that it doesn't work.

 

I must confess that I haven't tried this but....., if you hide a partition from a given OS, that OS won't know the hidden partition exists. My guess is that if it didn't work for somebody, they did something wrong.

I have hidden partitions in the past from certain OS's for other reasons so I can say from experience, if a partition is hidden, it's completely invisible to the OS it's hidden from.

I did some searching on this too. I came up with this. Don't know if it works or not but it can't hurt to try it. It involves editing your registry so be sure to back things up first.

No restore points are available when you use Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 in a dual-boot configuration together with an earlier Windows operating system

 

alternative

The alternative is to use a free utility named ERUNT to back up your registry automatically and just use a real backup program to back up your system. ERUNT works on all 32 bit windows and I think he has 64 bit versions. Google finds it.