Cleanly remove Vista before Win7

I'm back now (9:45). Going to check the icon at boot.

 

Back and working on it again...

Very interesting behavior on trying to change the icon in the boot OSS. Crashes the program and it reboots right back into itself again with the F6 and escape DOS screen then the 5 sec. timer. I can change any of the others with no problem, but not the one Win 7 Beta entry.

Also very strange, the Vista icon is not available in the selection panel in the boot OSS version, but it is in the Windows version. I did check the version in the boot one and it showed 2,160

Looking at the bootwiz.oss I now see that the locked item seems to be gone as well as the os_type="" now. I think we had it as ntvista before.

enclosed...

 

bootwiz

 

Set the os_type back to ntvista. You can do this from Windows. Don't start OSS in Windows. Just make the change, save the file and reboot back into the OSS menu and see if it's better.

 

Well... This resulted in what I think was a new message.. "the file system type of the operating system is not supported." and went nowhere. Tried changing the icon afterwards and crashed again. Retried the Win7, same message. Switched to XP icon and booted right up.

I checked the bootwiz.oss once back in windows and we are back to os_type="".

I did look at the drives and files in boot OSS earlier and they were all only showing #1-4 when I browsed. Browsing on the XP would give me C: references. Probably because that was the active partition.?.

No bright ideas on this end unless the whole OSS deal is corrupt somehow or there is something new with this OS. How many other folks have it setup with Win7?

bootwiz attached again.

 

...I thought.

 

11:22 am PST and I am around if anyone has ideas...

 

This is normal when OSS can't automatically detect the OS. As long as the partition referenced (#1-4, in this case) is the correct booting partition, there shouldn't be a problem.

I'm beginning to think that it may be worth trying a complete uninstall of OSS (from the DD/OSS CD) and then reinstalling it. There may really be something corrupted with it. When you do the uninstall, select XP as the default OS. Before reinstalling OSS, it might be a good idea to delete the BOOTWIZ folders (especially the main BOOTWIZ folder if it's not removed by the uninstall).

Quite a few other people have posted and didn't report any problems with Windows 7. The manual setup is the same as for when Vista isn't recognized. For some reason, your system is being especially problematic.

 

Ok, I will give this a shot. I'll boot to cd, uninstall, come back to XP, confirm deletion of bootwiz folders, reboot to cd and install OSS again. I assume that it will do some sort of autoconfiguration at that point. Any hints on coaching this? Should I try and add system files/folders if it doesn't?

I'll take a look at what it builds for bootwiz. I would think that I would try to modify the partition lines to what you have supplied me for the tweaks, or would you rather I just post it first?

Let me know if I am out of order here on anything.

Gary

 

After the reinstall, don't make any changes. XP should be found okay. Also, don't run OSS in Windows before saving a copy of the BOOTWIZ.OSS file. I want to see the new file created on the first boot-up.

After you have a backup of the original BOOTWIZ.OSS file, you can go ahead and run OSS in Windows and see if it makes any changes. It shouldn't cause a reset.

Also, check that you can successfully reboot to OSS and into XP several times (at least) and there's not any problems with the BOOTWIZ.OSS file being reset or additional "unknown" OS entries being added.

 

Got it. I'll be back.

 

This is getting strange now. Uninstalled, verified removal of bootwiz folder, reinstalled from boot CD. Back into Windows XP and immediately went to the Bootwiz folder to copy out the bootwiz.oss and lo and behold there is none.

Figured maybe I needed to go through the full boot cycle without the boot CD so I did that, back into XP fine, but no bootwiz.oss in the bootwiz folder. The folder only has one file, context.oss which I will include. There are three folders in there, 7d2363f7, CHEKFILE and UNINSTAL

Looking at my Win7 partition I see there is also a Bootwiz folder and its only contents are a context.oss file. The contents of that file are simply "<contexts partition="501810410" />"

My external Seagate eSATA has the same, a Bootwiz folder with just the context.oss with "<contexts partition="2592522231" />"

When I looked at the listings in OSS when I booted There were two unknowns plus the Windows XP Media Edition. Just 3, no Vista listed in any form.

I have not yet opened OSS in Windows.

Watcha think

 

What partition did you select for OSS to install to? Have you checked every partition to see if the "main" OSS BOOTWIZ folder ended up somewhere else?

If you have menu entries, then the file has to be somewhere.

 

I don't recall getting an option for which to install too. It's possible I went by it. I'm going to strip it again and start over from scratch as the only thing I can think of is that it went on one of the Dell partitions.

I'll be back.

 

That must have been it. Did the custom install this time and was able to specify the XP partition. It still just showed the three partitions in the menu.

Here is the file straight from my install to XP boot.

 

I opened OSS in windows and it looked identical. Copied and pasted the bootwiz contents afterwards into Word and did a character comparison to the original I sent you so definitely no modification was made.

OSS is showing the Dell recovery, Dell utilities and the XP folder and still lists the Win7 as partition 4 behind the scenes, but it is not in the boot option menu.

 

Here is the file with the Windows 7 entry added. See what happens. Replace the existing file and then reboot. Don't run OSS in Windows until after the reboot, just in case.

 

Couldn't boot in to Win7 although it did show up in the list this time, again with no icon displaying. Attempting to boot to it resulted in the "The file system of the Operating System is not supported" message again.

I compared files (attaching the new one) and it appears that it removed the os_type="ntvista" setting and reset it to null "".

Too weird.

 

If you deactivate OSS (set XP as the default OS) and then use DD to set the Windows 7 partition Active, does Windows 7 boot okay?

Does a chkdsk /f run on the Windows 7 partition show any errors?

 

Haven't run the chkdsk, but I have been in and out of the Win7 manually like that quite bit. I've been doing a battle with a WUSB54G Linksys wireless network adapter that I got running last night and actually did some of the posting here from that OS. Win7 is running like a champ when I deactivate OSS and activate partition 4.

One little item. I have renamed that partition Win7 twice. It seemed to have lost the label at one point and may have now again from what I remember seeing when I looked at the new OSS install.

That partition was created first with DD, although the original creation was when I put Vista on last year. I did reformat it with DD at the start of this recent exercise and then let Win7 do it again when it installed itself (both times).

Now, I have heard talk of a separate Vista boot partition that I have not visually seen anywhere. As I say, it boots like a champ when it is active.

There is one thing I can think of that has not been tried and that is to hide the XP partition in OSS when booting Win7 if you think that could be affecting things somehow. I can give that a shot if you think it worthwhile.

 

Go ahead and run it.

That's a different setup and not something we want to add to the mix.

Try it and see. It shouldn't make a difference, though.

 

Tried both with no help at least from trying to initiate the OS change from XP. OS not supported error right off the bat and it won't go into shutdown.

There is one thing that I never did that I might as well do now as I now have the proper DVD and that is to do the boot repair on XP to get rid of the old Vista boot on that. I'll try again from a full reboot after that.

 

Did the fixboot and that cleaned up the Vista option, but no change. I still am being stymied by the operating system not supported message.

Kind of at a loss at this point without totally losing the whole Win7 partition and starting everything over from scratch. I don't think I really want to go through all of that though without a better track record of successful Win7 OSS setups. I have a lot of things set up in the new OS and my USB network wireless adapter took almost as much work as this getting a driver that would work.

Anything else up your sleeve?

Does anyone from Acronis actually monitor this 'official' forum?

 

Can you post a screenshot of the partition table for the XP/Vista drive? You can get this from DD in XP. Start DD, select Manual Mode, right-click on the "Disk #" of the drive, select Advanced >> Edit. This will open the Disk Editor on Sector 0. Select the View menu and select the As Partition Table option. Resize the screen, if necessary, to display the entire partition table. It may help to verify if nothing looks odd with it.

Do you have an image backup of the Windows 7 partition (with TI or another imaging program, for example)?

There is also one more easy thing you can try. Deactivate OSS (select XP). Set the Windows 7 partition Active. Hide the XP partition. Boot to the Windows 7 DVD and select the Repair Mode. Start a Command Prompt and run the following command (<ENTER> means to press the ENTER key):

Code:

bootrec /fixboot <ENTER>

This will reset the boot sector of the partition. You may have already done this. If so, there's no point in doing it again.

When you boot into Windows 7, can you start a Command Prompt and post the output of the bcdedit command?

I will try and run some tests with Windows 7 and OSS. I currently have it on my test computer so it's just a matter of trying OSS with it.

I haven't gone back through the thread and checked... are you running the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 7?

Acronis only very rarely (almost never) posts in the DD forum.

 

I just ran a quick test with XP and Windows 7 32-bit. I started in XP and installed DD and then OSS. I rebooted and OSS found XP. I booted into XP and manually added the Windows 7 entry (exactly the same as if it were Vista). I rebooted and the OSS menu came up with both XP and Windows 7 and the icon was correct (Vista's). Booting works properly for both.

I think something is just not quite right or something got messed up on your drive or the Windows 7 partition.

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One other thing we didn't try was to remove bootname="bootsect.sys" from the Windows 7 entry. Perphaps OSS is doing something with it or trying to even though the option is not selected to write it.