Forgot to reactivate Acronis Boot Selector...

[kowen]

I hope someone can help me with this...

I have WinME as the OEM OS on my Compaq PC, with XP Pro added from an OEM disk. I bought Acronis Disk Management Suite, and use the Boot Selector also. Well, I needed to boot to C (XP Pro is on Drive D, E & F are for DVD & CD R&RW drives). So I used Boot selector, removed Palm Desktop from that, and went back to Drive D with boot selector. Installed updated version of Palm for XP, it works fine, then before I shut down, defragmented Drive D even though not necessary, then shut down.

The next day my computer would not boot. It said:

Starting Acronis Loader...

Acronis Loader: Unable to run Boot menu.
Press <Enter> to continue...
(I did, then...)
No commands for booting operating system. Press <enter> to reboot...

and when you do press enter, it just repeats the above message.

I forgot to activate Acronis Boot selector once I got back to XP Pro. I had uninstalled both Palm Desktop softwares on ME and XP, once I got the other for XP installed everything worked fine.

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I was able to get a floppy disk to get to the A:\ and C:\ prompts, even the D:\ prompt. I also did try booting from the bootable Acronis CD I made as they advise when you install the download.
I had read about your test report file that I copy to a floppy disc, run on my computer, then send the test report file to you, wanted to do that but mine are the older 1.4? mb disks, not the newer high capacity disks.

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Do you think I should re-install Acronis from the bootable CD?? Right now it's running an IDE DPS self-test (??), it takes a while, test 1 went by kind of fast, but this test 2 is taking a while. When you hit F10 before the actual boot starts, this is where I can set or change the boot order. I could run chkdsk on C:\>, but not scandisk. Tried running scandisk on D:\>, but the command didn't work. If there was a way to run the 2.mb floppy disks on this laptop (a Win95 Toshiba Tecra 720CDT) I would get them, but they seem to work with the faster drives (I guess Omega??), then I could run your Report utility on my PC. I have a 900 Athlon, 40gb harddrive, 640 megs of ram (I use scanners and Photoshop 5 LE for editing photos) and it is about 4 years old.

With Acronis I re-sized the partitions, now ME has about 11 gb with 2+gb free, and XPp has
about 28+ with right at 6.1gb used. I do like your product-it installed and partitioned very easily, fast also, allowed me to keep ME and get more space for XPp. I'll let the IDE DPS test run it's course, as it looks like it's going to be a while, but it is progressing.

If you can direct me if possible as to how to activate the boot drives, through at least C:\> , then I'd appreciate it, as it looks like I can't get to safe mode (I'm not sure how from a C:\ > prompt-), just the Compaq Setup Utility via F10. F8 doesn't get me anything but the computer failing to boot after trying to load Acronis...

ANY help would be appreciated, thank you...

Kerry Owen

[Acronis Support]

Hello Kerry,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Director Suite (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/).

Please accept our apologies for your inconvenience.

Please boot your computer from Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 Rescue CD you made during the installation process and choose the option "Install or Activate Acronis OS Selector 9.0". After that please reboot your computer in normal mode. There should appear the boot menu of Acronis OS Selector 9.0.

Thank you.

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Andrew Berezovsky

[kowen]

Thanks Andrew,

This is what happens when I choose "Install or Activate Acronis OS Selector 9"- it analyzes Partition C then D then goes to an option screen, the only available option is "Repair/Update Acronis OS Selector", the other options are grayed out. If I choose to Repair/update, I get the warning (yellow triangle included) that I'm about to install the demo over the main version.

Would this get me going if I did this, and then just re-register my license?? I'd hope so, as i really need the boot selector option...

Another thing, in the demo version-I can get to it if I try to use it in the safe or full version mode-the boot option (black checkered flags) is grayed out in the toolbar...

Kerry

[Acronis Support]

Hello Kerry,

It looks like you are using the CD produced by the trial version of Acronis Disk Director Suite. Please choose the "Repair/Update Acronis OS Selector" and then boot the computer into Windows. After that please start Acronis OS Selector under Windows and reactivate it again in order to replace the demo version with the full one.

Thank you.

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Andrew Berezovsky

[kowen]

I cannot get it to boot into Windows-that is the problem. The "checkered flag" boot logo is there in the toolbar but grayed out. The "Operations" button/drop down menu is grayed out also, so when you say boot into Windows, that is not an option.

My computer is messed up. Is getting it into safe mode out of the question with Acronis controlling the boot sector? It doesn't pay attention to F8 during start up. I've tried using the command C:\>WINDOWS, and no go there either.

Can Acronis send me a CD I can boot/re-install this from? I paid for the product, yet can't boot the computer, so what-get a new PC? Whatever bootable CD I was instructed to make is what I made, it just has the boot option grayed out, offering no help to me. I don't have my licensing information, that is on my PC (this notebook doesn't have a copy of it), but you all should have my records, if you need more information, let me know.

Otherwise, I'm out one desktop. Please let me know where do I go from here with this.

Regards,
Kerry

[kowen]

Another thing, after trying to re-install from the boot CD, then restarting choosing the C drive to boot (from f10 and Compaq's boot order menu), I get the message "Acronis OS Selector cannot find the necessary configuration files. Please re-install Acronis OS Selector", of which I can't because of the CD I have. I think there is a price difference in buying the software download and purchasing the CD, if Acronis would charge me the difference I'd be willing to get this, with OS Selector. Send me some details or email me...

Kerry

[Acronis Support]

Hello kowen,

Please insert a diskette into the floppy drive and run the file available by the link below:

http://www.acronis.com/files/support/mbrautowrite_en.exe

Once the floppy is written, boot the computer under consideration from it and confirm that you want to fix the master boot record.

This will allow you to boot into your system. After you boot to Windows please launch Acronis OS Selector and choose "Tools" -> "Activate".

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman