OSS alternatives?

Due to the problems I've had with OSS I'm looking for an alternative boot manager. Any recommendations?

I used Boot Magic happily for years, but it hasn't been adequately updated, so you can still only boot from FAT partitions. So that's out.

I tried System Commander yesterday but my USB mouse won't work with it (even with 'USB legacy' set in the BIOS), which makes it a pain to navigate, and I don't like the way it makes hidden partitions appear as having an invalid file format -- that means I can't use an image program to copy such a partition from outside that partition.

I've found the following which I might try out -- OSL2000 Boot Manager from osloader.com, BootIt Next Generation from terabyteunlimited.com, and Partition Boot Manager from sadevelopment.com. Anyone have experience with these?

I have to say I'm very disappointed with what you get these days in the area of disk utilities. The programs are very expensive, yet buggy, the documentation is often unclear, and the support is ordinary (VCom's site is a mess).

 

When I saw your message, I had a glimmer of hope. I hoped someone had found an alternative. I agree with you totally. Much as I like Acronis products in general, the difficulty in setting up OSS and it's unreliability prevent me from recommending it to anyone with Vista.

I tried dual booting XP and Vista on my wife's machine with OSS, but it wouldn't work . Finally arrived at a really bastardized combination of the Windows boot manager and EasyBCD that works but doesn't hide the partitions from each other, so I am afraid to go back into XP because of the bug that causes XP to wipe out Vista's system restore files.

On my laptop, I got XP and Vista to dual boot using OSS by following Mudcrab's instructions, but it got flaky and about a month ago ADD crashed and I couldn't boot into either. My Acronis backups of the relevant partitions and boot sectors would not fix it. After a day or so of trying to fix it, I used the Vista Install dvd to fix it so I can boot into Vista and then installed EasyBCD which theoretically allows my to go into XP, but am still afraid to do that because of the system restore problem.

I think Grub is a possibility, but it is complicated. I may resort to it, though.

 

By far the easiest I've found is GAG (The Graphical Boot Manager). Not the prettiest but so simple to setup and you can also use directly from a CD without installing (and messing with the MBR) is needed. Boots all Windows variants, Linux etc. Similar to OSL2000 etc. but less complicated.

 

I use BootIt NG. Very simple to use after a steep learning curve.

 

I've eventually settled on GAG, after trying OSLoader 2000, which caused strange problems. GAG's a piece of cake, really recommend it. It perhaps isn't suited for really complicated arrangements, but for two XP partitions it's perfect.

I did eventually get OSS working, as reported in another thread, but I still found it buggy, and I decided I preferred a program that interferes with your system as little as possible, like GAG. OSS, on the other hand, writes stuff all over your hard disks.