Best practice for making boot drive images in dual boot setup?

I have had to reinstall both Windows XP and Windows 7 recently, and was pretty angry to discover that both the partition images I had made via Windows native backup facility and my Acronis images, when it came to the time when I needed them, failed me - both declared corrupt or incorrect! Taken me two days to reinstall everything - and I haven't finished yet. Luckily I am on holiday!

So I am trying Macrium Reflect (Free). My question is probably a daft one, but is there any advantage (with Macrium installed on both O/Ss) to making an image of the XP boot partition when I am in Win 7, and the Win 7 partition when I am in XP? Or would it make no difference at all?

I guess I'd only be able to restore the backups when booted into the O/S in which they were created...

Thanks,

Martin

I used to do that years ago and quite often ran into problems... What I tend to do now with a duel boot system is use a USB flash drive and have Macrium build a Win PE recovery disk on it and do all the backup and restore operations after booting from that.

I make an image of Win7 and the System Reserved partitions, then make an image of the additional operating system's own partition separately.

If you don't have a system reserved partition or the XP boot loader is installed elsewhere, then I would make one single image of both the operating systems partitions... since you have to option what to restore when the time comes anyway.

Also if you do need to restore I found the only reliable way is to make sure you restore back to exactly the same partitions to avoid boot problems.

Of course there is other ways but to me that is simplest.