HP System Recovery broken after installing OS Selector...?

Hello,

I recently purchased Disk Director Suite 10.

I have a HP Pavilion m7470n 64-bit with Windows XP Media Center installed on it. I purchased it about a month ago.

I've used System Commander on my other two computers for years, and originally installed System Commander on the new m7470n when I made it dual-boot with SuSE Linux 10.1. However, after installing SuSE Linux, I couldn't get System Commander to recognize SuSE Linux... Partition Commander, the one that comes bundled with System Commander, sees the area on the hard disk where Linux is as either free space and/or 'damaged'...

In any case, since System Commander wouldn't boot into Linux, and I didn't want to use GRUB to boot both Windows and Linux, I decided to try Disk Director's OS Selector (Boot Manager).

However, like many, if not most, new computers today, my m7470n came with a recovery partition holding all the original software... necessary if one ever needs to do a clean boot... not an infrequent occurrence with a hack like me! Fortunately, I have copied the one set of recovery DVDs you're allowed.

The problem is that after I installed Disk Director's OS Selector, the recovery partition became unbootable. OS Selector recognizes the recovery partition as an operating system ('Unknown Operating System'), but when I try to boot into it I get this message:

"INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 14.

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

(Yes... I'm virtually certain it's OS Selector. This is the second time this has happened. It happened before... previous to a clean reboot. In both cases, the problem presents itself immediately after installing OS Selector. There's no partitioning immediately before installing OS Selector,... nothing that I can think of that might cause this problem...)

Of course, with both System Commander and OS Selector, the F10 key, which can be used to boot into HP System Recovery (recovery partition) at boot-time is deactivated. However, you're able to access HP System Recovery from System Commander's OS selection screen... again, it's an 'Unknown Operating System' to System Commander, as well.

My best guess is that System Commander swaps out some code that HP System Recovery has in the MBR... and OS Selector is just writing over this code, and/or not swapping it out when I boot HP System Recovery.

Anyway... has anyone encountered this issue? Does anyone know a fix. Obviously, if I need to do a clean reboot I can always use the backup DVDs. However, imagine what an OS Selector customer might think of this if they hadn't made the recovery CDs/DVDs...!?!

Also... just to be certain. Does OS Selector save a copy of the original MBR such that if I uninstall OS Selector the original MBR code will be restored?

There's another relatively minor issue... The mouse, both in System Commander and OS Selector doesn't work properly in the environment outside of Windows... that is, the boot-time instances... on the new 64-bit m7470n.

This is kinda odd. I have 3 HP Pavilions, including the newest one, the 64-bit m7470n... on the two older HP Pavilions, the mouse works fine for the boot-time instance of System Commander. The m7470n has an optical mouse, the HP Pavilion a230n has an optical mouse also, and the HP Pavilion 7850 has one of the older trackball mice.

So, I don't think it's the optical mouse per se... although it's possible there could be a hardware problem with the optical mouse on the m7470n, but the mouse appears to work fine in Windows...

Since this is already a long post... One feature that System Commander has that would be nice in OS Selector is System Commander's feature of being able to set the default operating system to boot to as the 'last' operating system that was booted to. Personally, I find that a very helpful feature.

Thanks,

Paul

 

I may be way off beam here - but I think the problem is that OSS has copied part of the System Recovery settings into its boot info.

sif files are part of a distribution setup file set - standard when creating batched setup files with Microsofts Preinstall Environment software.

I'm sure that if there is an easy way to get to the bootwiz files this could be checked.

If you've got an actual XP CD then from console mode you could fix the boot files and MBR and start all over again. I think Acronis might have a better suggestion .

Colin