Basic Disk Director Instruction for Newbee

Hi -

I just purchased the Disk Director Suite, with the specific needs of installing multiple OS's. I currently have XP and am wishing to install Linux as an alternate boot system.

To my surprise, I have yet to find any direct instructions as to the proper steps on installing a second (Linux) operating system. I am obviously new this software and would rather not corrupt my current XP OS.

I have created a partition and all seems to be fine on that front. Could anybody give me a quick insight as to the proper steps for this?

Thanks in advance,

CypherTac

 

Sorry Cypher, I am also new to Acronis and have only been able to figure out win98\win31 dual boot on an old desktop using DD\OSS. I did learn that the DD User Guide is done very poorly and you have to struggle to figure out what it means. For example, if you are partitioned correctly and ready to install a new os using OSS, you will probably fail. OSS has this "Operating System" known as "Install from floppy" then there are 3 different ways to "Reboot" from the OSS menues, I tried one combination, it wiped out my working win98 os.

Chances are DD\OSS will wipe out your XP before you figure out how to install Linux, so make sure all your data is backed-up. If you dont mind reinstalling and reconfiguring all your XP applications, then go on ahead with your dual boot experiment. Many times the experts in this forum can show you how to fix things once DD\OSS screws everything up.

 

CypherTac,

As mangoman said, it's always a good idea to have a backup of the drive (or at least important files) before working the software that changes the MBR, partition structure, etc.

OSS can be a hit or miss program. If you have Windows installed and want to use OSS to boot Linux, you should probably install OSS from Windows (make sure you're using the latest build, 2,160).

Make sure that OSS works correctly, you get your Windows menu item and can boot successfully into Windows.

Then use DD (either from the boot cd or from Windows) to create your Linux partitions. You'll probably need at least two, one for the file system (root) and one for the swap file.

Depending on what Linux OS you're installing, it may use either LILO or GRUB as the boot manager. These can be either installed to the MBR of the hard drive or to the bootsector of the Linux partition. The later is prefered as it doesn't require a reactivation of OSS.

Ubuntu for example normally defaults to installing GRUB into the MBR. However, if you use the "alternate" install cd you'll have the choice to install to the Linux partition instead. You'll also have the options to setup the partition "links" the way you want. This is what I do. When you reboot, OSS should automatically detect the Linux installation and setup the menu item. If it doesn't you'll need to run the detection wizard, selecting the Linux partition, mark it bootable and it should find it.

If the MBR does get over written by GRUB or LILO, you'll need to boot from the rescue cd and reactivate OSS. Make sure that you have created a rescue cd that contains the OSS installation and activation programs.

OSS does have some irritating bugs and the "auto" features are a pain when they don't work correctly. Once it's setup, however, it seems to work pretty good (at least for me). I currently use OSS to boot Vista, 2 XP's, Ubuntu Edgy, Kubuntu Edgy and Ubuntu Feisty.

Also, I have never used and the the "Install New OS" wizards in OSS. I have always done the installs manually by booting from the cds/dvds.

If you have any problems, post back and I'll do my best to help.