viewing BOOTWIZ.OSS from DD loses OSs !

[Krachmacher]

This is a strange one....

I had a multiboot system (1 xp, 5 vista) up and running no problems.....

Boot from the rescue disc and select DD safe version
Select the first partition in the list, right click, select explore
Navigate to C:\bootwiz & edit bootwiz.oss
Dont make any changes to the file, but click ok

At this stage the file appears to be ok still - if I stay in DD and edit the file again it looks the same.
However, if I now reboot, I've lost all but 2 of my OS's in OS Selector, and also lost the names i'd given these 2 OSs!
Sometimes (I've run through this scenario several times) I can boot these 2 OS's, other times boot fails with 'cant find autochk' error (i think because boot partition has been hidden).
At this stage can see that bootwiz.oss has somehow been changed, losing all but 2 of the OS's (perhaps because those are the only 2 on primary partitions, others are on logicals).

If I exit the bootwiz.oss editor with cancel instead of ok, the problem does not occur.

This isn't really a problem now - I was able to regenerate the bootwiz.oss using the OSS OS Detection Wizard, i'm just curious if anybody else has seen this and can shed some light.

[MudCrab]

First, if you're going to make changes to the bootwiz.oss file you should always make a backup copy. That way you can copy it back or at least reference it if necessary.

It's possible that saving/editing the bootwiz.oss file using DD corrupted the file. I know this happens if you paste in any information, but it doesn't sound like you've done that.

I would recommend only using the Windows Notepad program to edit the bootwiz.oss file.

If you want to read up on how the corruption can occur, see this thread (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=179471). Posts #8 (Problem #2 section) and #42 show what is happenning. In that case it was the boot.ini file, but it is still a regular text file just like bootwiz.oss.

If you have the problem occur again (or make it occur), save a copy of the "bad" bootwiz.oss file and a copy of the "good" bootwiz.oss file. Look at both of them in Notepad and see what the differences are.

You could also attach them to a post in this thread and I'll take a look at them. You'll need to rename the extention to .txt to attach the files.