CCleaner showing system restore points from both OSs on dual boot system

[user12356789]

I am dual booting two copies of Windows 7 64bit and under the System Restore page all restore points from both installs are shown.

The regular Windows system restore dialog correctly only shows entries from the current system.

 

If you would like more information just let me know.

[DennisD]

Hi user, and welcome to the forum.

 

I don't have an answer for you, but in the event that none of the other guys do, the devs do read all these posts and I'm sure that if they do require any further info they will ask you for it.

[mta]

I think this is normal - maybe not wanted, but normal none the less.

Back when I was into dual boots, I remember Windows would simply make folders as needed on your hard drive for all it's requirements.

So some folders on the drive would be for one of the boot OS's and some other folders for the other bootable OS.

Windows knows which is which, but how would CC know this?

And that would get even harder if you have a dual boot of Windows 7 AND Windows 7 (if I've correctly understood your 1st post).

 

You don't specify how you have done the dual boot, hopefully to different drives or partitions.

If it's all to the same partition, I think you'll be noticing similar things with Updates, Recycle Bin, Temp folders, etc.

[Alan_B]

Can Windows Explorer see both Windows partitions simultaneously ?

If so you have far worse potential problems with your computer than a CCleaner "feature".

 

If not then please disregard the following :-

 

If you launch one version of Windows and use Windows Disk Management,

you can then change the System Volume Names of each Win7 installation to uniquely identify each partition.

Then you can delete the Drive letter of the Windows partition that is NOT running.

 

Then you can boot into the other version of Windows,

and Windows Disk Management will still use the correct new System Volume Names of each partition,

but both drive letters will be as the were before any changes..

Now delete the Drive Letter of the "other" partition that is not running.

[user12356789]

 

You don't specify how you have done the dual boot, hopefully to different drives or partitions.

If it's all to the same partition, I think you'll be noticing similar things with Updates, Recycle Bin, Temp folders, etc.

 

They're installed on two different hard drives.

 

 

Can Windows Explorer see both Windows partitions simultaneously ?

If so you have far worse potential problems with your computer than a CCleaner "feature".

 

I'm not completely sure what you mean by this, even though the one drive has another win 7 installed on it, it is still just a regular hard drive so unless I am missing something important I don't see why it would be a problem for me to see both drive from one installation?

 

I have also successfully dual booted XP and 7 before and I have never noticed any problem or clashes between the two operating systems before until I discorvered the system restore points in CCleaner.

[Alan_B]

It can be FATAL for System Volume Information to be simultaneously visible on both the XP and the Win7 System drives.

 

There are differences between how each version is run.

 

XP was designed/cobbled-together before Windows 7 and knew nothing about it.

The things that XP does to S.V.I is not the same as Win7,

and as a result XP damages what Win7 uses.

I think Win7 knows what not to do to the XP S.V.I.

I could be wrongly remembering the details - you need to trust Google more than my old memory.

 

I suggest that you boot into XP if available (or one of the Win7 if not),

and launch Windows Disk Management and adjust the Window to show all the available details and take a screenshot and post it.

 

That would give a better idea of your situation than mere words.

 

 

 

 

 

[user12356789]

I never had any problems with XP and 7 and if I remember correctly I found some people that said that 7 was smart enough to dual boot with XP as long as you installed XP first and then 7.

 

I am not running XP anymore but now just two 7s, here is the disk management on my primary system:

C is my primary drive, with my first win 7 installation on it and D is the second, E and F are just extra hard drives.

 

 

 

It can be FATAL for System Volume Information to be simultaneously visible on both the XP and the Win7 System drives.

What exactly is System Volume Information? 

[mta]

it's where Restore Points live.

[user12356789]

Thanks.

So it would be a problem if they shared system volume information?

But it also almost seems like you are saying that it is a problem for one to see the other's hard drive, which doesn't make sense to me, I don't see any harm in being able to browse both hard drives from either OS.

[dvdbane]

It can be FATAL for System Volume Information to be simultaneously visible on both the XP and the Win7 System drives.

@Alan_B give explanation to another situation which is XP+7, not 7+7

the OP currently use 7+7

maybe, need some changes on how ccleaner detect restore point because windows detect r.p correctly

or test it on another clean installation to see if the problem exist

don't have enough space to dual boot so i can't help much

[Alan_B]

http://www.sevenforums.com/

Experts on the above forum have in the past warned against :-

Allowing the "running" version of system to allocate a drive letter to :-

The "alternative" system partition;

Any "System Reserved" partition.

They have also warned against having more than one Disk with the "Active" flag set.

 

I am not in a position to argue on the above.

 

In the above forum and in other places I have seen reference to loss or Restore Points when XP and Windows 7 partitions can see one another.

In post #4 I referred to "Potential Problems" because I recognised that two off Win7 partitions is not the same as one XP + one Win7

but I have no confidence in Microsoft that Win7 + Win7 is all sweetness and light.

 

[user12356789]

 

Experts on the above forum have in the past warned against :-

Allowing the "running" version of system to allocate a drive letter to :-

The "alternative" system partition;

Where did you read this? As far as I can tell dual booting is maybe not extremely common but it is definitely possible and safe and many people do it without any problems.

I have also successfully dual booted XP and 7 for a very long time without any problems at all and I am now dual booting 7 and 7 without any problems (besides for the system restore).

 

 

 

They have also warned against having more than one Disk with the "Active" flag set.

Now that you mention this I think I have found the problem; after installing both operating systems I used the Disk Management tool to rename my second hard disk and in the process I accidentally click the Mark Partition as Active option. There was no obvious way to undo this and according to a few web pages I found only the first active partition would be used to boot from, and as far as I could tell it didn't cause any problems so I just forgot about it.

 

After you mentioned the active partitions again I did a search to find out how to undo it. Now all the system restore point have disappeared and after manually creating one both the windows system restore and CCleaner show the same thing.

I will also boot into the second OS to make sure everything is still working there.

[user12356789]

UPDATE:

I have booted into my second OS and the problem still exists, CCleaner sees restore points from both systems and Windows only sees the restore points from the current system.

I guess that they are both using the same system partition so the system restore points for both are stored in the same place?

[Alan_B]

Where did you read this? As far as I can tell dual booting is maybe not extremely common but it is definitely possible and safe and many people do it without any problems.

I have also successfully dual booted XP and 7 for a very long time without any problems at all and I am now dual booting 7 and 7 without any problems (besides for the system restore).

I told you where I read that -

http://www.sevenforums.com/

I have made several hundred postings there over several years and do not have the time to locate the relevant topic in which my questions were answered.

I just remember the advice that I have followed and also suggest.

 

I KNOW that dual booting SHOULD be safe, but experts who have understanding of how to consistently avoid problems do NOT allow the "alternative" partition to be needlessly accessible to the "running Windows system" via a drive letter.

 

I am absolutely confident that your alternative Windows "system restore points" are needlessly accessed via the letter D:\

 

If you delete anything within "D:\Windows\SYSTEM32\"

(either by accident or just to prove me wrong - and confirm that it is deleted)

You will find that either you cannot boot into that alternative Windows system, or if you can then whatever you deleted is likely to remain absent.

 

Having that drive letter allows damage to the contents of that partition as a result of

User accidents when doing the wrong things ;

Running third party maintenance utilities

(possibly including CCleaner and Defraggler, and certainly including alternative tools that do not confine their actions to Microsoft approved API's);

Windows natural errors and accidents ;

Easy infections of the alternative quiescent system from malware entering the running system.

 

 

I guess that they are both using the same system partition so the system restore points for both are stored in the same place?

Wrong

I predict that when booted into the alternative system it was probably C:\ -

and absolutely certainly its properties would have shown

A System Volume Name of "Second Disk"

and a Capacity of 465 GB and Free Space 423 GB.

I suggest you double check.

 

Your screen snapshot tells me that :-

 

You "normally" booted into Windows

on a partition shown as "(C:)"

and it has a Capacity of 931 GB and Free Space 842 GB

and that Windows Explorer CAN ALSO SEE your alternative Windows System as being

on a partition shown as "Second Disk (D:)"

and it has a Capacity of 465 GB and Free Space 423 GB

and Windows Explorer can see :-

both operating systems located at

C:\Windows\ and D:\Windows\

and if you are an administrator and can view hidden system files,folders and drives then

Windows Explorer can also see :-

C:\System Volume Information\ and D:\System Volume Information\

and consequently even if you are not an administrator and cannot view hidden system files,folders and drives,

because you have run and therefore authorised CCleaner,

it WILL access and possibly modify the restore points which are held in

C:\System Volume Information\ and D:\System Volume Information\

 

I could be wrong, but I predict that if you use Windows Disk Management to remove the drive letter D:\,

then CCleaner should no longer see the restore points of the other system.

 

Your screen snapshot ALSO tells me that when you boot into the alternative Windows System :-

 

You have "alternatively" booted into Windows

on a partition shown as "Second Disk (C:)" - (assuming a typical installation )

and with a Capacity of 465 GB and Free Space 423 GB

and that your "normally booted" Windows system would have been found on

a partition shown as "(? :)" - probably "(D:)" but could be anything or nothing

and a Capacity of 931 GB and Free Space 842 GB

 

Please note that System Volume Names are defined on the physical drives and are the same regardless of the operating system that sees them.

Drive Letters are only know by the operating system which is running,

and you can use one system to change the drive letters but this has no effect upon the letters assigned by the alternative system.

 

Regards

Alan

[login123]

Hi, user1. 

 

I would not remove the drive letter D: until someone posts up that they have done it and it worked. 

 

For your initial problem, I'm not sure why CCleaner can see both sets of restore points.

 

I do know that the procedure for dual booting is strongly affected by your BIOS. 

For example this is a dual boot setup, 2 separate HDDs, xp on one, 7 on another.  

Both HDDs have active and boot flags.

This BIOS normally goes straight to the win 7 HDD, but I can choose the win xp HDD using the BIOS boot options.

The win 7 OS can see everything in the win xp HDD, including the System Volume Information folder. 

The win xp OS can not see anything in the win 7 HDD. 

There are more quirks, won't list them here, unless needed.   

 

The point is, its complicated. 

 

My suggestion is:  If the native system restore function can only see the restore points on its own HDD, just use that to turn system restore on or off.  Don't set CCleaner to clean system restore. 

 

edit:  And the developers will appreciate this.  They will probably know why CCLeaner behaves that way and fix it in a new release. 

[Alan_B]

@Login

When you are running XP, what are the drive letters which Windows explorer shows for the XP partition and the Windows 7 partition ?

I strongly suspect that XP cannot see the Windows 7 HDD because it has no drive letter assigned to it,

but you can use XP to run W.D.M. and add a drive letter and then it WILL see your Windows 7 partition.

When I dual booted XP + Win 7 they could each see the other one - until I received and accepted expert advice.

 

I now actually have two versions of Windows 7

The first is on the original HDD.

The second is on a recent SSD

 

When Windows 7 was installed and then launched on the SSD,

it ran as C:\

and assigned a new and different letter to the old C:\ partition on  the HDD.

 

Due to advice I accepted from experts I then removed that new and different letter from the SSD perception of the HDD.

Via the BIOS it was possible to launch the HDD version of Windows and it still saw itself as being C:\, and perceived the SSD as some other drive letter.

[login123]

Alan, the reason I posted that caution is not to doubt your advice.  You know far more than I. 

Its just that much of the advice I got from several forums just didn't work. 

However, the forum you linked is very dependable. 

And if you actually did delete that drive letter and everything still works that's great for user1 to know.

 

Here is what the setup here looks like: 

windows explorer running in win 7:

 

Local disk F: is the win xp partition, its on the xp HDD. 
Local disk G: is just for storage, its on the xp HDD.

Both are writeable from win 7, except for certain locked system files. 

 

windows explorer running in win xp: 

 

Disk 0, win 7 does not show at all

 

Diskmgmt running in win 7:

 

HP_Recovery (D:) is the HP factory recovery partition,

 

edit:  deleted a couple of my most idiotic sentences.

 

Diskmgmt running in win xp:

 

disk 0 is the GPT formatted win 7 disk

[Alan_B]

@Login

Thanks for the info.

 

Disc 1 is a standard MBR Bootable style of HDD and is used by your XP system

 

Disc 0 is GPT style which includes a "protective MBR" which protects the GPT partitions from modification/damage by a GPT UNAWARE operating system.

I guess that your XP system is not able to safely do anything to the GPT hence it refers to the 3 separate partitions as a single "GPT PROTECTIVE"

 

Your Windows 7 system can see the F:\system volume information\ - which is where XP restore points live.

Can CCleaner running under Windows 7 see the Restore Points on XP ?

If not it could be that your situation is different due to a different organisation of Restore Points that are somewhere within S.V.I.

 

CAUTION :-

 

G.P.T. is bad news, especially when used with M.B.R. Disks on SATA connections.

 

MickeySoft has published a KB acknowledging that SATA connected disks are numbered in order of enumeration.

That is snake oil salesman speak for an uncontrolled race hazard that users must live with.

In practice :-

upon start-up after a prolonged shut-down, my GPT HDD is Disk 0, my MBR HDD is Disk 1, and my MBR SSD is Disk 2;

upon a Restart the numbers 0,1 and 2 are allocated differently.

One consequence is that any utilities such as Hard Disk Sentinel that logg the performance of drives,

may maintain logs based upon volatile Disk numbers rather than fixed consistent values such as System Volume Names.

When SATA was first released on an unsuspecting world, one of the first casualties was image backups.

I think Macrium Reflect was the first image backup utility that was fixed to cope with variable Disk numbers.

 

My bitter experience :-

 

Upon upon entering the BIOS very briefly after a prolonged shut-down, the GPT HDD and MBR HDD had a race and neither won.

Without knowing exactly how and why Windows went so bizarrely wrong, the results were :-

The GPT disk had its GUID style Disk ID replaced with an exact copy of the hexadecimal number Disk ID of the MBR style Disk

Windows saw two disks with identical numbers and rectified an illegal situation by putting the original MBR disk Offline

Windows coughed and spluttered because it had no pagefile.sys nor any %TEMP%,

which had been held in E:\ on the original MBR Disk that was now offline;

All my Macrium Reflect image backups were now on the GPT disk that was being WRONGLY accessed as MBR,

and Windows just cannot see all the GPT partitions when it stupidly thinks it is seeing an MBR style Disk.

I was easily able to change the hexadecimal value Disk ID to a different hexadecimal value and then I put the Offline Disk back on-line

and that restored access to my browser profiles and once more I could release my SSD from the burden of Pagefile.sys and %TEMP%

 

Unfortunately due to the GPT disk NOT having a GUID but a Hexadecimal number,

the partition holding my Macrium Backups was perceived as part of unallocated space,

so all backups were lost.

 

Unfortunately I have not found any way to change a hexadecimal identity to a GUID,

Had both my HDD used the same style, either both MBR or both GPT,

this stupid Mickeysoft error would have been a minor 5 minute inconvenience that I would have forgotten within a week.

 

Fortunately most of my backups were duplicated onto an eSATA connected external drive.

and after testing a large number of data recovery utilities I think I have rescued all my files - and the Macrium backups all validate perfectly.

 

SUGGESTION for those with a mix of GPT and MBR

 

If you can reliably boot up from a prolonged shutdown - be thankful.

If you can reliably restart - be ecstatic

but do not push your luck and pause briefly in the BIOS before launching into Windows - if you pause just long enough perhaps you to will spend 9 months looking at a GPT disk as if it was MBR.

 

[login123]

Guess I got lucky, This UEFI BIOS handles all that for me. 

All I have to do is remember which SATA HDD has which OS

. . . since there are only two I can manage it.  

 

Your last post sort of reinforces the idea that user1 should not remove that drive letter.

Your experience is very different from mine, and mine is different from from his.

 

I must also stay with the recommendation that user1 doesn't use CCleaner to deal with those restore points.

Windows will delete them as it needs to, and the few times I have manually deleted them in win xp it didn't make much difference. 

[Alan_B]

I fully agree that if it is true that Windows 7 will only remove the restore points that it is booted into,

and avoids touching the restore points that the alternative boot system is responsible for,

then CCleaner should not be allowed to transgress that boundary.

If CCleaner actually has the ability to delete the restore points of the alternative system then it is a bug that causes functional damage to the system

If its ability is restricted to displaying them I would classify it as cosmetic damage to its own presentation.

 

I will however point out that experts appeared to agree that it was dangerous to expose the alternative system to damage by assigning a drive letter,

and I suspect there are many other third party system maintenance utilities that are prevented by Windows protection from damaging its own system components,

such as WinSXS,

but might allow it to perform equivalent damage on the alternative system so that when it becomes time to boot the alternative it will crash.

 

I see nothing in my last post to suggest that removing a drive letter is a bad idea.

 

My problem was NOT that partition E became inaccessible due to the loss of is assigned letter,

BUT THAT THE ENTIRE 7200 R.P.M. HDD WAS A USELESS SPINNING WASTE OF SPACE,

and hence Pagefile.sys was totally lost

 

I will admit to a confused memory.

 

For 9 months I have lived with Windows 7 running on my SSD and using a new 27 GB partition E:\  on my 1 TB proper and true MBR HDD.

At the time of the disaster, when Windows stuttered and spluttered into a sort of form of life :-

ALL partitions were inaccessible on the 1 TB proper and true MBR HDD ;

and ALL partitions were useless on the 600 GB original GPT and horrendously distorted MBR hybrid HDD,

and all that Windows could see was two apparently empty partitions at the start of the disk - and all the rest of space was "unallocated",

and that was because Windows stupidity cancelled the "fake protective MBR" but failed to create a secondary partition table to reference the half dozen partitions that followed.

 

The fact is that Windows was running on an SSD and accustomed to using a Pagefile.sys located on the 600 GB HDD,

Due to Windows stupidity both HDD were useless and all their partitions were useless,

so Windows wanted to waste 8 GB of SSD before it allowed me to login in to my account.

Once I had control I easily changed the hexadecimal value of the Disk ID of the 1 TB drive,

and resurrected its partitions,

and created a new 27 GB partition E:\ on this 1 TB HDD to replace what had been on the 600 GB GPT-MBR HDD,

and created an 8 GB Pagefile.sys in the new E:\

and deleted the 8 GB Pagefile.sys from the SSD,

but to cover future Windows stupidity emergencies I created a 16 Megabyte Pagefile.sys (minimum it would accept on 64 bit system)

 

I will agree that Windows will be unhappy if you remove the drive letter of a partition that holds its Pagefile.sys,

but I have reasonable confidence that regardless of its proven stupidity,

Windows is unlikely to allow you to remove a drive letter from an essential system partition.

 

I have never encountered a situation where changing or removing a drive letter prevents you from subsequently restoring the original letter.

 

Regards

Alan

 

[login123]

OK.