Installing OSS

Re: addendum: "Ranish"

Howdy Seeker_m, sorry to left you in the cold.

RanishPBM (...or whatever suffix) ONLY required you to have ALL your OSes installed in 'active' partitions! In your case, you got 3 HDDs and each OS were installed on each HDD. Therefore, my presumption was ALL of your independent drives' OSes were contained in 'active' directories.

Ranish does not care HOW MANY Active partition (or dir) you have set up in one HDD (as consolidated) on in several HDDs as long as the OSes that you want to 'run' should be build on 'active' partition/dir!

Pre-installation requirement of Ranish was - Set aside one 'complete' cylinder- i would highly recommend it to be on the 'first' drive that you intend to install a 'default (or most favoured)' OS on every bootup -in one particular partition that can contain the minimu Ranish file size of 1.4Mb (mine is set at 75Mb but uses so much less). Remember to place that pre-requisite 'complete' cylinder to the last "complete" sector (note: when you format a partition, the last finite "cylinder" of a sector IS NOT always complete!! If it's NOT complete, then move back a "cylinder" to look for a COMPLETE one and - that's where you install your RanishPM) of your 1st drive's OS partition.

I URGED you to read those 2 linkages i had previously indicated, and take further notes of other related links within those two... coz it will give you a very clear headings of what is "involved" in formats, partitions/dir, cylinders and MBRs.

If you DO INTEND to peruse a REAL boot manager with its incomparable benefits unlike "pseudo" BMs... then understand Ranish and install one to test drive.

....Shalom!

 

Re: Installing OSS... and Further More,

.... Ranish DOES NOT put a "finite" number of OSes in finite numbers of partitions that are ACTIVE.

Whether your 'active' partitions are aggregated in one HDD or each 'active' ones are in each HDD... to RanishPM... No Problemo!!!

Once installed - RanishPM (aka: ranishBM) counts on what you INDICATED within its own 'grid', that is the Ranish MBR (and it can be saved, in fact it should be). the Ranish MBR RECORDS the active partitions' in alphamerics & manifest it on 'boot time' for your selective choices!

Aside from those, Ranish ALLOWS you to "re-arrange" your previous-defaults so after you re-edit your chronological bootup proc, the latest 'defaults' that you had set shall boot on as you like it. C?

 

Re: addendum: "Ranish"

I appreciate your added input, but since I went ahead and installed OSS, I'm concerned about how to test RPM without it interfering with OSS or the MBRs of my Windows drives. I think that you give me too much credit, because I get lost very easily reading anything that requires an understanding of anything very technical. For instance, while I know what is mean by a cyinder, I have no idea of how to define it in the kind of terms that you are speaking of.

While I have an open mind, and a curiousity about this, I do not intend to let them jump into anything that is possibly going to disrupt my system. If that means that I'm stuck with a pseudo BM, then so be it.

 

Are you trying to setup a Default OS that will automatically boot after a specific amount of time if you don't select an OS to boot?

If so, then you can set the option in Tools->Options->Startup Options:


If you want the default to boot immediately, then you can select that option, but you'll have to press ESC right when it displays on the screen (or even before) to make the OSS menu appear.

 

By "immediately" are you speaking of the microseconds that XP's boot menu gives you? I probably will go for the 5 second timeout, if that actually works like it should. I should have looked further, but I assumed that was what the set default link was supposed to offer.

 

Hmm, I thought that this was the answer to the problem, because it was set to disabled. However, after setting it to a 5 second timeout, I rebooted and it still didn't make any difference whether I pressed F6, ESC or nothing, it still loaded the OSS menu, with the only difference being that another window counted down the seconds to boot. Between the black screen with bouncing cursor, the Acronis loading screen, the please wait for Acronis to load and then the 5 seconds timeout, it makes the booting time much, much longer than it should be. Am I missing something?

 

I'm not sure what the "bouncing cursor" screen is, but OSS can add a little time to the bootup process depending on your system. On fast computers, this can be only a second or so. On some computers, it can take several seconds while OSS is showing the "clock" processing screen before the OSS menu displays.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

No matter what boot manager you use, it will have to boot into it in order to give you the options to select what OS you want.

 

Definition (simplest) of 'Cylinder' in HDD can be refered in "Capacity Measurement" within the page of this link ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

And btw, mudCrab's intro of Acronis (an excellent piece of backup util) was indeed, in the right direction too.

 

I do understand that a boot menu does add a bit of time, but nothing like OSS is taking., even Grub worked better than this is. Regardless of the startup options (and I tried all three) there is no response to either ESC or F6. I sit there tapping on F6 and it remains about the same length of time as when I had the startup options disabled and had to wait for the menu to appear. I've just about come to the conclusion that I do not want OSS at all. I noticed that there was an option to deactivate it, but what will that do? I'm assuming that OSS did write itself to the MBR of the boot drive (which is SuSe) so I assume that Grub no longer exists there. If I have to reinstall SuSe that is no great loss. It is easier to change the boot priority in the BIOS than to mess with this.

EDIT: BTW, on one of the last series of reboots that I did working with this, Acronis said that the NTLDR was missing, but when I rebooted it found it. OSS just does not seem reliable.

 

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, I don't need anything to describe the basic aspects of harddrives. Perhaps that article did contain the answer to my question somewhere, but a scan of it did not make it apparent. If I understood, RPM requires defining the exact location of the beginning of each OS, as well as a precision description of it's own location. If that is true, then generalities are of no use. In Linux, the partitioner provides these numbers, but as far as I know, Windows does not. When it comes to prescribing the location for RPM, how do you define the size of a cylinder? I assume that each cylinder's size is different depending on it's radius from the center of the drive.

Perhaps this will make it clear that I'm a hopeless case.

 

It may be that OSS is having a problem with your particular hardware. Usually that screen goes by quickly (like 1 second).

If you deactivate or uninstall OSS, it will ask which OS you want setup as the one that will boot automatically. So if you select SUSE, then that's the one that will boot. The difference between deactivate and uninstall is that deactivate will not remove the OSS installation from your computer, it just removes OSS from the MBR and sets the OS you select back there.

 

Thank you MudCrab, from beginniing to end, you have been very helpful. I now have OSS deactivated and Grub is back on the MBR of the SuSe drive. If I decide to use OSS's partition for something else, I don't suppose that would present any problems...would it?

 

You should be able to use the partition you created for OSS for whatever you want. If you intend to reactivate OSS, then don't delete the BOOTWIZ hidden folder. Otherwise, it doesn't matter. You can uninstall OSS or just reformat the partition to clear it.

 

This may be totally unrelated, but then perhaps not. All was normal until a few minutes ago, when I heard a few singular low clicks coming from the case. First drive 1 had disappearred from Computer Management and Windows Explorer, then a short while later, I found that both drive 0 and 1 had totally disappeared from x64.

Rebooting, I saw that the BIOS had detected the drives, and then they reappeared in x64 also, but attempting to access some files on drive 0 evoked some errors from both my firewall and something about MS Visual C runtime. I went back into CM and both drive 0 and 1 had disappearred again.

Rebooting once more, the BIOS failed to detect either of them. I shutdown and checked connections, which seemed fine, and removed power for a few seconds from the case.

When I powered up, I changed the booting priority to go to MCE on drive 0 and it booted normally (which is where I am now). However, going into CM the drive 0 that I'm using is nowhere to be found. But, drive 1's SuSe partitions are there, but only in the upper window... but OSS's partition is not and neither are in the lower window. But drive 2 is there also.

It's as though the gremlins are playing some tricks on me, perhaps because Halloween is approaching. Since OSS/Suse is on drive 1 which is slave with MCE on drive 0, is deactivating OSS possibly a factor in this problem?

EDIT: Correction...I just checked CM again, and OSS's partition is listed in the upper window, but so far away from the SuSe partitions that I missed it. Also MCE's drive and partitions are shown normally now...this has my head spinning.

 

I think that my last post was a false alarm. I noticed that a beep or two was missing from the BIOS's USB detection pattern, and then that the USB floppy drive was missing. I disconnected it and there was none of the usual disconnection beeps from Windows. I then connected it to another USB port and it fired up.

I don't really know if this was the reason for the missing drives, but I have a hunch that it was.

 

Thanks i think this solves my problem! Didn't know about installing OSS via CD!