Well I guess it is back to Symantec Ghost or Acronis.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Ben

"Fakir" wrote:
[color=blue]
> sorry to say that vista chooses to delete any and all restore points except
> for its own, it serches for its own restore point and upon finding the xp
> one rewrites the header which it then no longer recognizes upon reboot, the
> only thing you can try is to install vista to seperate drive completely and
> dual boot in that fashion. It may or may not work. I am using that here and
> so far had not needed yet to take a step back to restore.
>
>
>
>
>
> "Ben" <bkatc@att.net.nospam> wrote in message
> news:3F6A95BC-68D6-4B78-A673-B22EBAC42CD0@microsoft.com...[color=green]
> >I am a tech and need to have access to both XP and Vista. Quite often I
> >need
> > to reload one of my PCs that were used as a test bed.
> >
> > When I create Dual boot configurations using XP-PRO SP3 and VISTA ULTIMATE
> > SP1 everything works fine until I sometimes try to restore a Vista
> > complete
> > PC backup from an external drive.
> >
> > The backups are created using Vista Complete PC Backup from within Vista.
> >
> > In the beginning the restore works fine but after half a dozen or so
> > restores, Vista can no longer locate a viable restore image on the drives.
> > It is as though the restore points are lost.
> >
> > This happens on Dell and IBM systems and I am using various brand external
> > drives.
> >
> > Can anyone collaborate or shed some insite as to why this may be occuring?
> >
> > Thx
> >
> > Ben[/color]
>
>[/color]