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General discussion

Windows Vista MBR

by YaHa96 Dec 18, 2009 1:48PM PST

Hi, I have an Acer Aspire 2930. Currently I still keep the PQservice partition, which enable restoring to factory defaults without recovery discs.
To access the recovery partition, I have to press <Alt>+<F10> during POST.

I have read that this shortcut can only be used with factory-settings MBR (Vista's MBR). I planned to dual boot it with Windows 7, and it means the MBR will be overwritten.
Can I just save and restore Vista's MBR after dualbooting it with Win7? And how could I do it?

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1 Posts

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I'm going with no.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Dec 19, 2009 12:38AM PST

Microsoft has changed how this all works and having just kicked a Vista 64 to the dust bin (installed Windows 7 64 bit!) I can write I'm not going back to Vista.

Let's say you need a backup of that old Vista. I thought about how I would go back and used CLONEZILLA to save an image to some USB external drive. This is not an offer to discuss CLONEZILLA but to share it is free and I got it done without reading any documentation. I think if one can install Windows, one can use CLONEZILLA.
Bob

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