Help - OSS ate my Vista

[evilprime]

Hey there everybody. I made the huge mistake of installing Acronis DD and Acronis OSS without doing any reading first. Silly me to think that it would work the way it's advertised to.

Anyway, I installed OSS because I wanted to see how it worked due to the fact that I plan on having a triple boot Vista/XP/OSX system. When I installed the OSS, the only operating system I currently had installed was Vista x64. After installing it and rebooting I was brought to the OS Selector. At first I thought "wow, this is going to be easier than I thought". Man, I was so wrong.

So here I am now not being able to detect my vista installation with OSS. I heave searched the lengths of the innertubes looking for an answer and I can't find one that is practical. At this point, I would be happy just to get my Vista booting normally again (without having to reformat).

I tried inserting my vista DVD and repairing the startup to see if I could get rid of OSS, but no dice. The only other option I found was to manualy create a boot.ini and copy a few files (ntdlr, ntdetect) into the root directory, but this isn't even possible in my current situation.

Right now i'm downloading a USB boot version of Linux so that I can access the herd drives and put these files on there. But I ran into another problem while preparing this step. I can't find the ntdlr or ntdetect files on the vista DVD. Every computer in my home is a vista computer right now and the vista search bar refuses to include the DVD drive in the search for files. I read it was in the i386 folder, but that folder doesn't seem to exist.

Is there anybody out there that can help me? Maybe put up a link to a download of these files (or will microsoft go sue happy if you do that?)

Please... I've had to reformat ind install vista like 5 times in the past 2 weeks trying to tweak it the right way and I finally had it set up right. But me being the smart guy that I am decided it wasn't enough and I wanted more OS's... Help... Please...

[evilprime]

UPDATE - I found a place to download the ntdlr and ntdetect.com files. I created a boot.ini file in linux, put them all on my C drive aaaaannnd.... NOTHING

still cannot detect an operating system, still stuck in OS Selector. It's about to become my new permanent OS. Thank you Acronis!

[MudCrab]

Vista doesn't use XP's boot files so you won't find them on your drive or the Vista DVD.

When you tried doing a repair from the Vista DVD, did you do anything manual or just the automatic options?

Boot to the Vista DVD, select to Repair, cancel any automatic attempts, open the Command Prompt and run the following command (<ENTER> means to press the ENTER key):
bootrec /fixmbr <ENTER>
bootrec /fixboot <ENTER>
That should get Vista booting again (assuming the system hasn't been further corrupted by other repair attempts).

[MudCrab]

OSS has a problem properly detecting some Vista installations, especially brand-name OEM versions.

If you included the OSS programs on your DD CD when you created it, you should be able to boot to the DD CD and uninstall OSS. This won't be necessary if the above method gets the system booting (it will basically deactivate OSS).

[evilprime]

Thanks for the speedy reply mudcrab.

using the command prompt to make those changes seems to have worked.

I think i'm going to stay away from multibooting for now, untill something that more easily supports OEM installations comes along.

once again thanks.

[umnlawgrrl]

Hi, I've got the same issue - but unfortunately, I don't have a Vista CD. my computer is an HP notebook, and the recovery system is actually on my D:/ drive (no CD was shipped with the computer, and of course I wasn't smart enough to burn a recovery disk before installing OSS.

i had no idea when i installed OSS that there was a possibility i'd be unable to use my computer afterwards. shouldn't there be some kind of warning?

any way to fix this? does anyone know if i can use a live boot linux CD to run the recovery application on my D drive? the computer is brand new, so i don't care if i lose the data on it.

[MudCrab]

When you created the DD CD, did you include the OSS programs? Or, if the DD CD is retail, hopefully, it should have the OSS programs on it. If so, you should be able to boot to the DD CD and uninstall OSS. The original MBR code should be restored.