From what I can tell, DD10 seems to be a flop on the OSS front

See: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=176369

I've been looking around on this forum, and I can't believe that you have to EDIT files to get to connect to an existing OS. Why can System Commander AUTOMATICALLY detect the OS and OSS can't. Pretty sorry stuff. Not only that, but I used System Commander for years, and NEVER had a boot problem.

While I'm impressed with the TI stuff, their OSS stuff has fallen down.

Plus, I can't even get a response on this forum, and it was the first I've had to make since TI8... Not only that, but DD10 trashed the bootability of my Vista install. WOW. I'm IMPRESSED with DD10 and Acronis (not)

 

Ron, is System Commander officially supporting Vista?

I agree with you DD\OSS is very dangerous, if you don't use them exactly right and with expertise, your hard drive low level format will likely be destroyed without warning. There are no step by step proceedures that Acronis stands by. Sometimes I doubt if anyone in the Acronis design team has ever been able to do someting like dual boot Vista\XP on a new HP Pavilion notebook with their existing 2160 build. If they know how to do it, why dont they post a step by step proceedure, on their website somewhere?

I realize there are many variations, but why dont they clew us in on some of the basics. At which point do you run OSS after you have used DD (!from the recovery CD only!) to get the partition ready for a new os?

Us poor guys in this forum are forced to experiment around hoping to find a method that will work. The experts who have been able to figure it out are a Godsend and the support they give is far better than anything you can force out of Acronis company support.

Acronis needs to integrate DD\OSS so it is one program, that would solve alot of the proceedural problems.

I am determined to get dual\tri\quad booting working on my computers and am still searching to see if DD\OSS, PM or SC are the most useful safest tool. I refuse to buy TI so it can save the day when DD\OSS destroys everything.

MangoMan

 

Ron:

Working at low level with partitioning tools is fraught with risk. I think the best advice that I read was, believe it or not, in the DiskDirector manual where they recommend getting an old hard disk and playing around with it for a while. This is especially true for the hex disk editor. The tools are very powerful but they can wreak havoc if used incorrectly.

I have read your other thread about installing Vista, backing it up with TI, deleting the partition, installing XP first, creating a new partition for Vista and then restoring your Vista image to the new partition.

The reason that didn't work has little to do with DD and a lot to do with the changes in how Vista boots. The new Vista bootloader works by looking for a unique partition identifier. This identifier, or UUID, is generated when Vista is installed. It consists of some mix of the disk ID and the starting sector number of the partition where Vista is installed. So if you move the partition somewhere else it will not boot. To fix this you have to do a repair with the Vista DVD, which will regenerate a new UUID and fix up the Vista boot manager. TI has not got this automated yet, but probably will do it some day.

The easiest way to get a multiboot setup working is to start by understanding a little bit more of what's going on beneath the hood. A great resource for this is forum contributor McTavish's site at http://www.multibooters.co.uk/

 

Thanks for the link, Mark.

The _New Vista partitioning rules_ is very good to know. I was tempted to use the build-in Vista Disk Manager to do some partition preparations for a new dual os install. According to this article it is safer to use the 'old partition rules' in DD.

It is interesting he talks about the pro and cons of many different _bootmanagers_ but doesn't even mentition our highly suspect OSS.

MangoMan