OS Reinstallation - Safe to delete BOOTWIZ?

Hey folks!

My boot disk is a Seagate 320 GB drive and is currently setup as a Dual-boot (Using Boot-Us boot manager) C: (Primary, Windows XP Pro OS, General Setup), C: (Primary, Win XP Pro OS, Audio Setup) D: (Logical, General Data Store) E: (Logical, Audio Data Store) - all on the same hard disk.

I purchased and installed Acronis True Image and DDS and thought I'd check out the OS Selector, too. I've since discovered that (unlike Boot-US) it isn't performing true hiding of the operating systems.

I've uninstalled OS selector but now I'm wondering how to get rid of the littering of "bootwiz" folders on all of my partitions. Since I'm going to reinstall my OS partitions, is it alright to delete all of the bootwiz files and folders?

Thank you in advance for any guidance you might care to offer.

 

If you are not using OSS then it's safe to delete the BOOTWIZ folders. Are you having problems deleting the folders?

Were you having any specific problems with OSS not hiding your OS's? What exactly do you mean by "true hiding"?

I use OSS and it hides mine from each other.

 

Thanks for a quick response, MudCrab!

I've been using Boot-Us boot manager for several years now. While I have had one or two minor issues, it has been extremely reliable and easy to use for me so I think that I'll continue to use it over the Acronis OS Selector (which seems to me to be rather cumbersome).

As far as true hiding of partitions is concerned, true hid partitions are those which are not visible to Windows XP (also 2000 and 2003 - not sure about Vista) . When installing a second Windows XP OS, prior installations must be "true hid" (partition ID AND boot sectors must both be changed) in order for them to be truly independent during bootup.

I read in another post here that OSS may not truly hide the partitions from each other. I want the partitions to be completely "unaware" of each others existence. I also want a stable, fail-safe boot OS - which means one that uses the KISS principle.

When I installed OSS, it would not detect the other OS that I have installed. I don't want to have to go into bootwiz.ini and monkey around. I just want it to work. Boot-US is a 10 KB program written in assembly, so it is extremely lean and efficient.

I'd appreciate knowing your take on OSS, however. How reliable and efficient is it? I haven't found any really clear tutorials on its use.

 

If you are familiar with Boot-US and it works well for what you want, then I would recommend you continue using it.

OSS has some very irritating "bugs" that Acronis hasn't fixed (even though they've been around for a long time).

As for hiding partitions, I think OSS just marks the partition as hidden and doesn't change any IDs. This hasn't caused a problem for me, but it can take some work to get it setup so you have isolated installs (due to the bugs).

If you want to boot from other devices (USB flash drives, USB hard drives, etc.) that are "writable" then I would also not recommend using OSS as it will take over the device making it where it will only boot when connected to the computer with OSS installed. In my opinion, this is the most irritating thing about OSS. It knocks out my GRUB flashdrive every time I forget and then I have to fix it with Knoppix.

 

I'll use Acronis for managing my partitions but will continue to use Boot-Us.

Many thanks for your comments, MudCrab.

Have a good one!