OS Selector and Vista Premium (Dell OEM)

Discussion in 'Acronis Disk Director Suite' started by anyday, Feb 22, 2008.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. anyday

    anyday Registered Member

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2008
    Posts:
    5
    Location:
    Columbus, OH
    After hours of searching and reading this forum I have not found any information to help me with this problem.

    I have a new Dell XPS M1530 laptop with Vista Premium and a Fujitsu 120GB SATA hard drive.

    I purchased and downloaded the latest builds of TI Home 11 and DDS 10 (build 2160), installed the products and then imaged by hard drive and created a boot CD.

    The first problem I encountered was when I first installed OS Selector and activated it. It found one bootable unknown partition but unfortunately as I quickly found out it was the Dell Utility partion. When I tried to deactivate the OS Selector I was no longer able to boot Vista.

    Thinking the OEM setup of my hard drive was the culprit I blew away the partitions and created one partition for my Vista and left the rest as unallocated.

    After restoring my Vista partition I tried activating the OS Selector and it comes up with no bootable partitions. Guess what, now I can't boot Vista anymore! A simple restore of the MBR solves the problem but I can't figure out how to get OSS to stop killing my Vist boot files.

    Ultimately I may want to try and install two other OSes on this computer, possibly XP and a flavor of Linux.

    Can anyone help me?!
     
  2. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2006
    Posts:
    6,483
    Location:
    California
    When you reinstalled Vista, was it from the Dell OEM Vista DVD?

    OSS has problems detecting non-Microsoft OEM Vista installations. This thread (especially Post #14) has instructions to manually add Vista to OSS when it isn't detected.

    This problem is known by Acronis and should be fixed in the next build of DD, but there is no timeline on the release.
     
  3. anyday

    anyday Registered Member

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2008
    Posts:
    5
    Location:
    Columbus, OH
    I just restored the image I made with TI Home 11.

    Unfortunately that thread did not help me (item #14) but I guess I should elaborate. After activating the OS Selector and not seeing any bootable partitions I exited OS Selector and opened notepad and made the entries similar to item #14 and then saved the file and opened OS Selector which, again, did not show any bootable partitions.
     
  4. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2006
    Posts:
    6,483
    Location:
    California
    If you want me to look at the BOOTWIZ.OSS file, I will.

    You'd need to reinstall OSS (do it from Vista). If you can't boot back into Vista because OSS doesn't find it, fix the MBR and boot into Vista (do not uninstall OSS). Then locate the BOOTWIZ.OSS file (in the hidden BOOTWIZ folder), make a copy, rename the copy to BOOTWIZ.TXT and attach it to a post.
     
  5. anyday

    anyday Registered Member

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2008
    Posts:
    5
    Location:
    Columbus, OH
    Okay I will work on that. I continued to try other things and now have to restore my image again.

    Thanks for your help on this.
     
  6. anyday

    anyday Registered Member

    Joined:
    Feb 22, 2008
    Posts:
    5
    Location:
    Columbus, OH
    UPDATE

    I finally have OS Selector working with my Vista installation. I started from scratch and followed these steps:

    1. Booted my laptop with the Acronis Boot CD.
    2. Selected Disk Director.
    3. Deleted all partitions (because I had an image of the drive).
    4. Created one partition for Vista and left the rest unallocated.
    5. Committed the changes and closed Disk Director.
    6. Selected True Image.
    7. Restored my Vista partition from my image to the single partition.
    8. Restarted and booted into Vista properly.
    9. Opened Disk Director.
    10. Created a new FAT32 primary partition 25 MB in size labeled BOOT.
    11. Committed changes and closed Disk Director.
    12. Installed OS Selector choosing the CUSTOM option and choosing the BOOT partition I had just created.
    13. I was forced to restart.
    14. OS Selector boot menu appeared with no bootable systems.
    15. I inserted my Slax Linux Live CD and booted it.
    16. I navigated to the BOOT drive and found the BOOTWIZ folder and edited the BOOTWIZ.OSS file as dictated by MudCrab in his earlier post following the steps in item #14.
    17. I restarted.
    18. OS Selector boot menu appeared with VISTA and it booted!

    YEAH!! Thanks for the help MudCrab!
     
  7. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2006
    Posts:
    6,483
    Location:
    California
    You're welcome. Glad it worked. Having the OSS files installed into a non-OS partition is a good way to go and what I recommend. This lets you restore your OS partitions without messing up your OSS files.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.