OSS 10: Windows XP and Windows Vista issue (separate drives)

Hey all,

Came here yesterday and followed the advice in one of MudCrab's (for installing XP on one drive and Vista on another - thanks for your posts), and it worked great. That was last night.

I have Windows XP Pro installed on one drive, and I installed Vista on a separate drive leaving the drive with XP NOT hooked up. I booted into Vista and installed OSS on that drive, rebooted, and all was well. I was able to select Vista as the OS and it booted just fine.

I then proceeded to hook the drive with XP back up. Went into BIOS and made sure that the drive with Vista was the first booting drive. OSS loaded fine and found the Windows XP install.

I then configured some parameters in OSS. Under Vista properties, I set the XP drive to hidden. Under XP properties, I set the Vista drive to hidden. I had the "Specify boot order manually" option checked and made sure the XP drive was first on the list.

Last night all was well. I booted a couple of times into each OS from OSS and it just worked. This AM I fired up my PC and after the BIOS screen, saw this error message:

non-system disk, press any key...

I pressed a key and the system proceed to boot into Vista without issue (expect for stopping for this error of course).

I shut down, and booted my PC from the Acronis boot disk I created. Loaded OSS via this method and thought perhaps it de-activated, so I selected to re-activate it. Rebooted and same error message. I then attempted to remove OSS from the app on the Acronis boot disk, and it appeared to work OK. Disconnected the Vista drive, reconnected the XP drive and reassigned my XP drive to boot first in the BIOS.

XP wouldn't boot, but I figured out that the active partition was hidden. I was able to unhide it using DD on the boot disk, and now I'm back in XP again successfully.

Is OSS this finicky all the time? I had it working to my liking (and as it should), and all the sudden "poof" this AM. Seems like a decent product and I enjoy using True Image which I used to backup my XP install and the Vista install before I installed OSS.

Any thoughts?

Warren

 

This error message isn't one I usually see with OSS. I would check that the BIOS has the Vista hard drive set as the booting drive. Sometimes when you reconnect a drive the BIOS order will change. Also, make sure you don't have any other bootable/non-bootable drives that could cause any problems. For example, no floppy disk in the floppy drive (if any), no USB flashdrives or hard drives connected, etc.

After making sure the Vista drive is the BIOS boot drive, reactivate OSS (if you haven't already) and see if it works.

Next, if you want to take the time, post a copy of the BOOTWIZ.OSS file to the thread and I'll take a look at it to see if I notice anything odd. Instructions can be found here.

 

Thanks for the reply.

Floppy drive is disabled in my BIOS and no USB drives connected. I do have one other drive in my PC which is used for data, but I had that drive and it's partitions hidden in the Vista config in OSS. No primary partitions on that drive - only logical.

Only external storage would have been my Lexmark AIO printer. It has built-in card readers on it, but the printer is powered down and was when I booted.

I did configure the BIOS to boot from the drive Vista was installed on (which is the drive OSS was installed on).

No BOOTWIZ folder that I could see (have OS set to show hidden files and folders). Would uninstalling OSS remove all this? I assume it would, but am not sure.

Since I made an image of the fresh Vista install, I may just restore that image and reinstall OSS and give it a go again.

Warren