Unable to uninstall OS Selector (please read!!!)

Hello,

I have this scenario as posted by another user (see below).

Since the post was dated from August last year, I ask:

Do I really have to open the PC and disconnect the IDE drives for the fixmbr to work? (Having to do so is a very painful task form me at this time due to the PC location and HW configuration... )

Hope there is a workaround!!!!

Thanks in advance,

Elf.

--- // ---
woodworks August 2nd, 2005, 02:51 AM
If you boot from a SATA or RAID hard drive installation and ALSO have an IDE hard drive(s), you need to disconnect (pull power plug) from the IDE hard drives for the FIXMBR to work properly from the Recovery Consol. Disconnect the IDE drives too, if you are trying to run the install/uninstall with the software.

Oversimplified, the IDE hard drives appear before the SATA hard drives or RAID array and the Recovery Console does not deal with the master boot record restore properly. There is a similar problem installing Windows on a RAID array, where you need to disconnect other IDE hard drives not part of the array.

--- // --

 

I'd check in your BIOS how the drives are set up.

For example, my BIOS allows SATA RAID set up or

2* SATA on one controller and 2 PATA (ordinary drives) on other controller or SATA drives will be accessed as PATA drives.

Apart from a RAID setup - which acts in a different manner - with the other types fixmbr will work.

My SATA drives are accessed as plain old SATA no RAID however for reasons that don't matter, my second drive is the OS drive and my first data, even though this is confusing to a few programs - fixmbr,fixboot etc all work correctly.

What I'm trying to say is check how your drives are arranged in your BIOS - you might be able to SATA(rise) them or PATA(rise) them - however if you do have RAID - there isn't much you can do without breaking the RAID volume.

Colin

 

Thanks for your help!

Yeah.. I checked and I have "IDE Raid Controller - Enabled"...

So I really have to unplug the IDE drives...

It's disappointing that the Acronis Boot Selector unistallation it is not able to restore the original configuration...

I think it's bad software design!

There is no reason for this!

 

Hold fire! If you just have RAID enabled - but not an actual RAID volume - then you can still use the above programs. In fact so long as you haven't mounted a raid volume - you can just disable the raid controller as it actually isn't doing much.

Are both your harddrives the same size? If not then it is unlikely you have an actual raid volume.

Colin

 

Hi bodgy!

Thanks for your kind help.

I solved the problem!

I did not have a RAID volume.

This is what I did:
1) I disabled the IDE RAID controller
2) Changed the boot order from:
- DVD
- RAID:WD
- MAXTOR (my primary partition disk)

to:
- DVD
- MAXTOR
- RAID:WD

3) Booted with Acronis boot CD and uninstalled OSS

It worked!

I guess I had a couple bad config:
1) RAID Controller enabled
2) Boot order

Yo da man!