[eshteyn]

vista has a built in function that compares to acronis imaging in the way that it periodically takes an image of you hard drive and stores it in the second partition. XP doesn't do that, it keeps the back-up files on the same partition, which if you think about it is not good because if your disk blows your lost and theres no way of switching it to a different partition for saving. As for the second partition its basically a copy of windows xp that is set as the secondary boot partition if the first doesn't boot. The second partition kicks up and runs windows recovery, which usually slows down the machine and doesn't work as well as a full re-install.