Cannot get OS Selector to work

I purchased disk director and I have both Vista 64 bit and Vista 32 bit in my machine. I can dual boot fine with vista's regular simple boot manager but I wanted to use Acronis boot selector so I installed it and everything was fine except that when the machine boots and I choose which OS to use in acronis boot selector, the machine carries on to the vista OS selections creen so I am now going through 2 boot selections. how do I get rid of vista's boot selection and keep only the acronis one?

 

Welcome to the forum.

This question comes up a lot. The best method is to avoid installing multiple Windows so they use the Windows boot manager.

Are both Vista installations on the same hard drive in different partitions? Vista doesn't seem to like how OSS changes the disk order so it usually works best if everything is on one drive or, if booting Vista and XP, the Vista drive is the booting drive.

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To try and fix the problem, you'll need to copy the Vista booting files from the current booting partition into the other Vista partition and then edit them so that each only has the correct Vista entry.

The booting partition is the Active partition and is usually the partition of the first Windows installed.

Take a look at the instructions here for separating XP and Vista. The process you want is similar, except you don't want to remove or rename the booting files from the first Vista partition.

Basically, the steps would be:

1. Boot DD from the CD. Hide the booting Vista partition and set the second Vista partition Active.
2. Boot to the Vista DVD's Command Prompt and fix the second partition's boot sector (bootrec /fixboot). Don't do any auto-repairs.
3. Use DD to unhide the first Vista partition and set it Active (back like it was).
4. Boot back to the Vista DVD's Command Prompt.
5. Copy the Vista booting files to the second Vista partition.
6. Delete the second Vista entry from the first partition's BCD file so it boots directly to the first Vista.
7. Delete the first Vista entry from the second partition's BCD file so it boots directly to the second Vista.

From that point, you can switch between them by using DD to select which partition is Active. OSS should also pick them up. If it doesn't, one will probably need to be added manually.

If you could attach the output of bcdedit, it might help. Open a Command Prompt in Administrator Mode and run bcdedit at the prompt. Copy the output into a text file or create a screenshot. Do this when booted into the booting Vista partition (the Active partition).

If you need more help on any of the steps, post back.