Dual boot not working

Hello,

Please can somebody help me. I have been trying unsuccessfully to set up a dual boot config on my pc today using Disk Director 9 and OS selector. I already have WinXP 32-bit installed on the C: partition of my primary hard disk and I want to dual boot it with WinXP x64. I created a second primary partition D: on my primary hard disk and followed instructions in section 8.2 of the manual to install the new OS into the new partition. WinXP x64 seemed to install ok and OS selector correctly detected it and added to the list. However, regardless of which OS I choose from the OS selector boot menu, the system then goes to the Windows boot menu where if I choose WinXP 32-bit it boots normally but if I choose WinXP x64 the screen goes black and the system hangs. Are there some settings I can tweak in OS selector or my boot.ini to fix this?

thanks
Dominic

 

Hello Dominic,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Multiboot Managing Software.

After you set the "Boot from floppy" option as described in the User's Guide you need to reboot the computer and choose the created "Boot from floppy" option in Acronis OS Selector menu. After you get the error message that there is no floppy found you need to reboot the computer, boot it with Windows Installation CD and proceed with the installation. Please repeat the Windows x64 installation in this way and let us know if you get any problems with it.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Ilya, thanks for getting back to me. However, I think I'm going to abandon trying to set up the dual boot for the time being after I had quite a major problem with OSS. It suddenly started hanging when loading at boot up with a dialog box that said "processing please wait". I tried a few reboots and left it for around 20 minutes but it was still stuck at the same dialog box. I couldn't find a way to disable OSS so I had to wipe the disk and do a fixmbr so I could at least boot from my XP cd and re-install Windows. If this i an easily solved problem I may set up OSS again in the future as I would also like to try Linux.

 

Hello dom1977,

I am really sorry for the problem you encountered.

To remove Acronis OS Selector without booting into Windows you may just fix MBR either using Windows Installation CD or with one of the methods described at Acronis Help Post.

Could you please describe where exactly Acronis OS Selector hung? How was the dual boot configuration arranged before you installed Acronis OS Selector? Did you use any boot loader before?

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Ilya,

The OS selector would hang as soon as the blue acronis background screen appeared, with the dialog box in the centre of the screen that said "processing please wait". Up until this point the OS selector menu had been loading normally and I can't think of anything I did that would have caused the problem. My dual boot config was arranged according to the manual as described in my first post above. I was about to try the method you described in your reply to my first post when the OS selector hanging problem started happening. I didn't use any boot loader before this, Disk Director/OS selector is the only software I've used to attempt to setup dual boot.

As I said in my last post, I'm not going to try Win XP x64 for a while (I can't get any 64-bit drivers for my sound card anyway) but I would like to use OS selector again to see if I can dual boot with Linux.

thanks
Dominic

 

Hello Dominic,

Acronis OS Selector should work properly with Linux. As for hanging at startup, could you please fix MBR either using Windows Installation CD or using one of the methods proposed at Acronis Help Post. This will allow you to boot into Windows. After that please uninstall Acronis OS Selector and install it from scratch. If the problem persists after that please let me know.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman