OSS won't recognize my bootable drives (bypass OSS)

[conticreative]

I have a HP 9600 laptop and I just successfully cloned my C Drive with the Acronis true Image Home program.

My HP Laptop has a Main partition and a restore partition on the Cdrive. I wasn't able to boot off the restore partition following HP's instructions. Since I was so happy with my other Acronis product, I figure I'd install OS Selector and use that to boot off the restore partition. My ultimate goal is to restore my Laptop with a fresh version of Vista.

I installed OSS but now the only option it gives me is to boot off the A drive (which I don't have). When I try to add my C drive (either partition) as a bootable drive I get the message:
"No New Operating System is found in specific Location..."

Essentially, I am now locked out of my computer.

I searched this forum and it seems this is a pretty common occurrence. However, none of the solutions I found applied to my situation or I wasn't able to understand what the procedure was.
Some of the answers were frankly a bit silly. With customers explaining they were locked out and the tech responding that he was happy that a solution was found (???)

No matter: I need to get back my computer or I'll have to load the old Drive and once again Ghost the OS on the new drive and start from scratch.
'
What should I do?

[MudCrab]

You need to either uninstall or deactivate OSS. Since there is no OS found, you can only "force" an uninstall by using the DD/OSS CD (assuming you included the OSS programs on the CD).

Otherwise, you'll need to reset the MBR back to the Windows standard. You would need a standard Vista DVD to do this. Since OSS didn't find your OS installation, I assume it's an OEM version and you probably don't have a DVD. However, if you do (or you can borrow one), here are the instructions:

Boot to the Vista DVD.
Select the Repair Mode.
Cancel any automatic repair.
Start the Command Prompt.
Enter the following command at the prompt (<ENTER> means to press the ENTER key): bootrec /fixmbr <ENTER>
Close the Command Prompt window and reboot the computer.

Another option (if you have a previous TI image of the partition), would be to restore the MBR/Track 0 from the image to the drive.

[conticreative]

Well, I could not wait for the answer so I went ahead and I flipped my drives and I ghosted the new drive again of the old drive which never had the Acronis OS loader on it.

In any event, as much as I love Acronis products, the OS Loader is a terrible piece of software. I realize there are plenty of people that are ecstatic about it and surely I have done something wrong, either in planning it or using it, but software like this should not cause someone with my experience to lock myself out of my computer.

1) Something is wrong because obviously it could not see the Vista OS boot not i one but two partitions. I am not the only one this has happened to and Acronis support's answer at various time was " a patch is on the way to fix this". This was over a year ago. Has nothing changed since then?
2) IF OSS tends to do this, then Acronis needs to have a switch to bypass the OS loader. It is inexcusable that if the OS loader does not recognize an OS there is no other option to boot the computer with "something"
3) I am sure that at some point someone on this forum will show me the error of my ways and will point out some procedure by which I could have avoided having to Ghost the drives again, but if that's the case the fault is in to making that procedure too difficult to access.

The whole reason why I was using OSS was because I no longer can find the disks I made from my recovery boot partition. The only fix I was able to find suggested using the recovery disks to boot off and then change the boot file to disengage OSS. If I had the disk I wouldn't have needed OSS to begin with.

Well, live and learn.

[MudCrab]

-{ Quote: "Well, I could not wait for the answer so I went ahead and I flipped my drives and I ghosted the new drive again of the old drive which never had the Acronis OS loader on it." }-
There's nothing wrong with doing what you need to to get your system back up and running.

-{ Quote: "In any event, as much as I love Acronis products, the OS Loader is a terrible piece of software. I realize there are plenty of people that are ecstatic about it and surely I have done something wrong, either in planning it or using it, but software like this should not cause someone with my experience to lock myself out of my computer." }-
OSS has many, many bugs and is long overdue for an update. While I use OSS and help on the forum, I am not ecstatic about it. There are other boot managers that are a lot more usable. It will be interesting to see if the new version of DD (if it includes an updated OSS) will fix the problems or make them worse. People fuss about Acronis releasing a new version of TI every year, but at least some of the bugs get fixed that way.

-{ Quote: "1) Something is wrong because obviously it could not see the Vista OS boot not i one but two partitions. I am not the only one this has happened to and Acronis support's answer at various time was " a patch is on the way to fix this". This was over a year ago. Has nothing changed since then? " }-
Except for Acronis supposedly having an updated build (which was never publically released), nothing has changed.

-{ Quote: "2) IF OSS tends to do this, then Acronis needs to have a switch to bypass the OS loader. It is inexcusable that if the OS loader does not recognize an OS there is no other option to boot the computer with "something"" }-
These types of problems make OSS especially difficult and I agree completely.

-{ Quote: "3) I am sure that at some point someone on this forum will show me the error of my ways and will point out some procedure by which I could have avoided having to Ghost the drives again, but if that's the case the fault is in to making that procedure too difficult to access." }-
From what I've read, the fault is entirely Acronis's and you didn't do anything wrong. I think most people install OSS from Windows and they don't usually have the OSS programs included on the DD CD. When that happens, they get "locked out" of booting and can't uninstall OSS. To make matters worse, most new brand-name computers don't come with standard Windows CDs/DVDs to do repairs.

-{ Quote: "The whole reason why I was using OSS was because I no longer can find the disks I made from my recovery boot partition. The only fix I was able to find suggested using the recovery disks to boot off and then change the boot file to disengage OSS. If I had the disk I wouldn't have needed OSS to begin with." }-
I doubt OSS would have booted into the recovery partition. It may have been able to be added manually, but I don't know if it's been tried.