Complete PC Backup on dual boot system with 1 hd

I have a laptop with a 320 gig hard drive divided into 4 partitions. I am dual booting Xp Professional and Vista Business 32 bit Edition. I plan on upgrading to Ultimate as soon as Microsoft ships it to me. I have 2 partitons for XP, 1 for vista, and 1 as a shared partition that has mydocuments and email settings so that both systems can access them.
If I use Complete PC Backup and select all partitions will this backup everything ot a 500 gig external, including the boot records so that if I do oa complete pc restore it will restore it so that my boot menu is restoreed in the event of a hd failure?
Also, when I get vista ultimate, I plan on using Bit Locker to encrypt my Vista partition. Will that affect the complete pc backup of that partition or any of the others?

Hi Jthensley,

Welcome to Vista x64 Forums.

I have never tried anything like that yet, but I believe it should work as you described it. In theory you will have a complete backup file of everything on you 320 gig hard drive as a on your 500 gig external drive in a folder. It will not affect your 500 gig in any way other than taking up space with the backup file.

I'm not sure how Bit Locker will affect being able to restore from the backup.

Shawn

Where at on a hard drive with multiple OS's and partitions is the boot record located?

It usually located on the 1st partition of the 1st OS installed. You can use Disk Management to see which Disk (partition) is listed as the boot drive.

Hi Jthensley,
Using the System backup from within vista, you should be able to do a full backup to another NTFS drive and it must be NTFS. So your external drive must formatted NTFS to work because Vista doesn’t allow you to do system backup to a FAT32 drive. The other option is use Symantec Ghost software to do full backup that includes all partitions on the drive. Also ghost software will give you the option to do partition backups too if & when is needed.
Tom,