OS Selector and Hibernation

[K0LO]

I have a few questions about OS Selector. I note from the manual that if you use OS Selector you should not hibernate your machine because the program needs to write files to disk, and you should not write to an NTFS filesystem that is hibernated. However, I have a laptop that I always hibernate. This limitation of OS Selector has prevented me from trying out the program. I currently use GRUB as my "OS Selector" but there are a couple of features in Acronis OS Selector that intrigue me such as the ability to add the Acronis True Image Secure Zone bootloader to the list of OSs and the nicer-looking GUI screen.

Upon further reading in the manual, it appears that when you install OS Selector you can, under "Custom Install", choose the location of the OS Selector files. Does this mean that I could create a separate partition, format it with something other than NTFS, install OS Selector in the new partition and thus get around the limitation of not being able to hibernate Windows?

Has anybody done this?

If so:
1. How large does the partition have to be?
2. Does the partition need to be Primary or can it be a Logical Partition?
3. What is the recommended filesystem type?

[shawn_selig]

hi, i use to use os selector... and yes you can select what partition you want to install it on... i made a specail 100-200mb partition with the os selector on it....then when i was done i hided that partition from windows...oh yeah and also i had the parttion formatted with fat32...

[K0LO]

Very good; that's half the battle. Now I'm just wondering if I create a FAT32 partition to store OS Selector in, will the program ever attempt to write to one of the NTFS partitions or does it write exclusively to its own partition? I'm also assuming that I only have one Microsoft OS on the computer and won't use the advanced feature of OS Selector to support multiple Microsoft OSes.

I'd still like to keep my laptop hibernated and use OS Selector. Right now to use Linux, I hibernate Windows and start Linux. To use Windows, I hibernate Linux and start Windows. I rarely reboot.

[K0LO]

I tried without success to get OS Selector 10.0.0.2117 to work with a laptop that hibernates. Here's what I did:


Created a 200 MB logical partition at the end of the drive for OS Selector
Formatted the partition with FAT32
Did not assign the partition a drive letter
Installed OS Selector in the new partition


While the program worked, I noted that it still created a BOOTWIZ folder in the primary Windows C partition (the one with the OS that is hibernated) and also added a visible NTLDR file to the root of the C drive (to replace the normal NTLDR file that is hidden and protected?).

Therefore, when the laptop was hibernated, upon re-awakening you could not get back to the graphical OS Selector screen (as the manual says), I assume because it knows that the machine was hibernated and was preventing writing to the NTFS partition to be safe. OS Selector would then just boot the default OS which was Windows XP in my case. Therefore, I am unable to select alternate OSes to boot when one of my OSes is in hibernation.

Acronis support, is there any way to make OS Selector work with a machine that is frequently hibernated? Did I do anything wrong in my setup?