OSS with vista: I had a laptop, now I have a brick

[kol]

I´ve installed DD on my Acer Travelmate 7720 with oem vista. Played for a while with DD and then installed OSS. I was asked to reboot so I did. Now my PC starts with OSS. It shows 3 OS:

Unknown (1): it starts Acer recovery disk... not my intention to wipe the HD
Unknown (2): it doesn´t work
Acronis SZ: it starts True Image, but restoring backups doesn´t work
(Vista is nowhere)

Trying to deactivate OSS is useless cos I must choose from one of the 3 mentioned "OS"

I didn´t created the Acronis bootable rescue CD
I tried to restore a backup with True Image boot cd but doesn´t work

So now I´m quite happy with Acronis products: I´ve made daily backups for nothing :thumbd: and OSS has turned my PC into a brick :thumbd:

[K0LO]

kol:

Welcome to the forum, although it would have been nicer to welcome you under better circumstances. You can try one of these two suggestions to recover:

1. Install DD on another computer, do not activate OS Selector, and use Bootable Media Builder to make a Disk Director boot CD. Boot from the CD and de-activate OS Selector.
2. Boot from a Vista DVD (any edition of Vista) and repair the master boot record, which will let you boot directly into Vista again. You can try the automatic repair.

OS Selector is rather dated and usually does not automatically recognize Vista. One of the more experienced forum members on here can help you with OSS configuration after you get it de-activated and your PC is booting normally.

[MudCrab]

After you have deactivated OSS, it would probably be a good idea to boot into DD and check if the Windows partition is set Active. This is because deactivating OSS will require you to select an OS to be the default and your choices may not allow the Windows partition to be correctly set as Active.

[kol]

-{ Quote: "Welcome to the forum, although it would have been nicer to welcome you under better circumstances. " }-
Thanks... and good bye :-\

-{ Quote: "
1. Install DD on another computer, do not activate OS Selector, and use Bootable Media Builder to make a Disk Director boot CD. Boot from the CD and de-activate OS Selector." }-
Deactivating or uninstalling with the boot CD was useless as I couldn´t choose vista as the default OS after deactivating or uninstalling


-{ Quote: "2. Boot from a Vista DVD (any edition of Vista) and repair the master boot record, which will let you boot directly into Vista again. You can try the automatic repair" }-
The repairing process began but failed

-{ Quote: "
OS Selector is rather dated and usually does not automatically recognize Vista. One of the more experienced forum members on here can help you with OSS configuration after you get it de-activated and your PC is booting normally." }-
Finally, I´ve used the pc recovery disk and lost all my system configuration. My pc starts with a "MBR error 3" message, but then vista starts as usual: the brick returns to be a laptop :) . Now (it had to be "now" :'( ) I´ve noticed that my backup files are just 5GB, so I´ll stop trying to restore them as they aren´t good. First time I restored a True Image system backup everything went fine. This is the second time I need it... and the parachute has a big hole... I made a dalily system backup, verified them, didn´t get a single error message... and it´s all rubish
SO, thanks, but no, thanks: I don´t want more OSS support. Thanks to Acronis I´ll spend this weekend reinstalling and configuring all my programs. All BUT Acronis programs: from now on, Acronis does not exist.
OSS is not a software: it´s the worse virus you can get, and people is paying to get infected. Shame!:-[

[kol]

-{ Quote: "After you have deactivated OSS, it would probably be a good idea to boot into DD and check if the Windows partition is set Active. This is because deactivating OSS will require you to select an OS to be the default and your choices may not allow the Windows partition to be correctly set as Active." }-

Thanks a lot for trying.
As far as I´ve seen, you seem to be the great guru of this forum...;)

[K0LO]

-{ Quote: "...Finally, I´ve used the pc recovery disk and lost all my system configuration. My pc starts with a "MBR error 3" message, but then vista starts as usual: the brick returns to be a laptop.." }-It's a shame that you resorted to the PC recovery disk because you could have fixed things so that Vista booted again. It would have only taken a couple of commands from a command prompt window from the Vista DVD to fix, and either MudCrab or I would have been willing and able to help you out.

Perhaps this is a golden opportunity - if you are going to start over then you might consider installing the public release candidate of Windows 7. You may like it better than Vista.