Last summer I bought a Sony Vaio F laptop. Sony's laptops standard contain a hidden recovery partition which will be used to install the OS the first time or to recover a next time. After Windows 7 was installed (equiped with the Sony bloatware) I made a Ghost Image (cold backup) of each partition (Ghost 15, version 15.0.1.36526).
- First partition: Recovery partition from Sony (hidden, not active I guess, no drive letter)
- Second partition: The System Reserved Partition (SRP) of 100 MB from Windows 7 (hidden, active, no drive letter)
- Third partition: The partition with Windows 7 (viasual, not active, drive C)
Next I modified the Windows 7 configuration (such as optimizing running services, mapping network drives, etc.), and I installed all basic software I need (printer drivers, Office, etc.).
After that I made a new Ghost Image (cold backup) of the third partition (the one I had personalized).
Recently I did a cold restore from the Windows 7 partition (on the same hardware, without installing other OS on that machine before).
- The "Restore anayway" option was checked but greyed out
- There were no additional options cheked (I took care that the "Set drive active" was unchecked because the partition is not allowed to boot).
At the end of the restore I got an error that I had to insert te recovery disk (see reporting in this thread).
I had no other option than pressing the "Cancel"-button.
Afterwards I was able to boot, but I saw a dual boot menu.
I could choose between "Windows 7" and "Windows Vista/Windows server 2008/Windows7".
Whatever I did choose, Windows booted and worked without errors.
I fixed the dual boot menu by deleting the "Windows Vista/Windows server 2008/Windows7" entry in msconfig boot's menu.
Q: Is this dual boot a normal behavior (I never saw it before with older Ghost versions an older Windows versions) or is there a way to get rid of it (bugfix, an option to set, ...)?
Thanks in advance
Tom