OSS and hidden partion in Vista home

I'm also trying to get a dual boot with Vista and xp to work on a Toshiba notebook with a factory install of Vista home. Im using 2160 OSS and it installs but does not recognize Vista. I end up with it only showing the secure zone as an OS. It will recognize the OEM Vista disk as an OS if I have it in the drive. I noticed a hidden partition at 1-1 on my hard drive and gave it a letter and then could see the contents of three files: Boot.sdi, Boot.wim, and winrepartition.ini. Then I had to change the letter back to none because otherwise I couldnt boot the computer back up. I think OSS wont recognise Vista because of the files on the partiotion with no drive letter but dont know how to get around this. Any ideas are appreciated.

 

Does your Toshiba have a recovery partition you can select to boot into? Or an Instant-On Media player? If OSS does install and work with Vista, you'll probably lose access this these.

OSS can be hard to get setup sometimes. Especially if there are other things on the drive besides just OS's.

It sounds like you have TI SZ installed. Is this correct?
Does it boot okay?

Did you try installing OSS from Vista or from the boot cd?

Does OSS not find Vista at all or do you get an "unrecognized OS" menu entry?

Do you have a complete drive backup (with TI, for example) that you can restore if necessary?

 

I installed oss from vista. It does'nt show any os, just the TI secure zone. I do have a good backup with TI.

 

Hi Rick,
I see we have basically the same problem, but I do not see a hidden partition like you have. Do you have a boot.ini file on your c:\ root? Is you bcd clean?
Is your OSS main bootwiz on C: also? I was going to try moving mine back to C from H, but doubt if it will help (and might hurt).
MangoMan

 

The bootwiz folder is on drive C:. I don't see that there is a boot.ini file anywhere. I have a bcd file in the boot folder but dont know how to check it. I can see the folder with no drive letter on partition 1-1 with DD and Vista is on 1-2. I tryed placeing the three files on the 1-1 partition onto the drive C: root, then reinstalled OSS but it still only recognized the secure zone as an os.

 

Rick,
To check your bcd start a "command prompt" and type bcdedit /v
then it should show the contents. Mine is 2 paragraphs about 30 lines, no repeat entries.

Does your notebook have a D:\ recovery partition (mine is 8Gig) with all the factory files? The more I think about it, this is probably why OSS cant see Vista; that is, HP and Toshiba have extra\nonstandard files associated with a factory restore and these are not yet recognized by OSS.

I am going to rerport this problem to Acronis tech support. I hope they can tell me exactly which files or entries need to be exactly where in order for OSS to "see" Vista. Then maybe we can put them there or (better yet) maybe they will expand the criteria of what an installed Vista "looks like" on the next Build. They sell alot of HP and Toshiba notebooks, I bet OSS doesn't see Vista on most all of them.

 

I have a recovery disk but no partition for that. The notebook came with a 1-1 partition about 180mb and no drive letter, and then drive C: as a 2nd partition with Vista on it and thats it. I do wonder what files OSS looks for to recognize vista. For xp the files are ntdetect.com, boot.ini, and ntld.

 

See this post, it may help.

 

OK so I got rid of the cheat cause I would like to figure this out. Next I tryed deleteing the Toshiba System Volume with no drive letter. Now I have 1partition driveC:\ with vista on it and a second partition with the TI secure zone on it. The laptop boots up fine. Then I installed OSS and again the only thing it recognizes is the secure zone, at this point I'm running out of ideas to try.

 

Do you have backups in the SZ?

OSS is still VERY buggy when it comes to detecting Vista. If you do a Vista boot repair, OSS may recognize Vista again.

I have not done any tests with Vista and a SZ so I don't know if that's causing a problem.

What order were things created in?
Did you install Vista, then TI and the SZ, then DD and OSS?
Or did you install Vista, then DD and OSS and then TI and the SZ?

Can you post your "bootwiz.oss" file? It may help to see it.

 

I believe in this order:
Vista (preinstalled at factory) TI, DD, SZ

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<bootwiz>
<disks>
<id734435587 bios_num="128" crc="62546283" real_bios_num="128" serial="53172" size="156301487" />
</disks>
<cds />
<partitions>
<id1397930667 begin="2811375" crc="36865" disk="734435587" fs="ntfs" number="2" serial="cf33c0b850c0b812" size="115250310" type="7" />
<id2938609336 begin="118061748" crc="35287" disk="734435587" fs="fat32" number="5" serial="4fd62cfc" size="38234637" type="188" />
</partitions>
<oses>
<id1115526738 boot_as_ms71="0" boot_as_os2="0" boot_cd_entry="0" boot_partition="2938609336" icon="icon_sys_acronis_secure_zone" language="" lba="0" name_template="%n%l %l(%ll%l)" nthide="0" os_type="acronis_sz" uninstall_info="1" use_manual_disks_order="0" write_boot="1">
<partitions>
<id1397930667 active="1" />
</partitions>
</id1115526738>
</oses>
<checkfiles />
<bootmgr disks_order_feature="1" need_automatic_uninstall="1" need_uninstall="1" />
<uninstall_info>
<active_lba_state>
<p1-2 active="1" />
<p1-3 />
<p1-5 />
</active_lba_state>
</uninstall_info>
</bootwiz>

 

There is no entry for Vista (as I figured). Also, from your order, OSS was installed last.

When you select to boot into the SZ, does it boot to Vista with a "Press F11 to enter SZ..." message or does it boot direction in the SZ recovery mode?

Do you have backups on the SZ? I asked because one option to try and fix this would be to unisntall OSS, Vista boot repair, remove the SZ and reinstall OSS. You would lose any backups in the SZ if you did this.

---

I really don't want you to do something that's going to screw up your system. Let me run a Vista/SZ/OSS test and see if I can figure out what's happening.

 

I'm making a backup on to dvd disk and that way I can delete the secure zone for now. I'm not too worried about scewing anything up as the laptop is new and not anything important on there right now. I appreciate your time helping me. Also when I tryed booting into the seure zone thecomputer hung. Then I deactivated oss and then it booted back to vista. when I uninstall oss it said it would default to the secure zone, but upon rebooting it went to vista.

 

I just installed Vista, TI, setup a SZ, activated the Recovery Manager (press F11 message at boot), then installed DD, then installed OSS.

OSS correctly detected Vista and the SZ and boots correctly into both.

Now I'm going to try installing OSS first and then setup the SZ/Recovery Manager.

 

Mudcrab,
I have a good backup so I uninstalled the secure zone. Now with only vista on the hard drive I installed OSS. This time it did'nt detect any os. The laptop only booted to the OSS menu with no OS's. I tryed to deactivate OSS, but it said noway, no os. Then I tryed to repair vista and reboot but same thing it went to the OSS empty menu. Finally I booted to the DD disk and from there uninstalled OSS, now I'm able to boot to vista. Hmmmm, now what??

 

I have completed the other test. Vista->TI->DD->OSS. OSS detected Vista correctly. I then installed the SZ. TI rebooted and set it up and booted back to Vista. Recovery manager didn't get installed (even though I selected it). I installed the recovery manager and then rebooted. Now I got the F11 prompt and then Vista boots. All okay so far. Then I reinstalled/reactivated OSS and rebooted. OSS still had the Vista entry and had added the menu entry for the SZ. Both booted correctly.

So, in a clean system, it seems to work correctly no matter whether OSS or SZ/Recovery Manager is installed first or last.

I suspect that the problem is that your laptop is actually booting from the small first partition. OSS is having a problem detecting Vista from it for some reason. When you remove the SZ and OSS it boots correctly.

Can you post a DD screenshot of your partition layout?
Is the first small partition marked active? Have you tried hiding it with DD, making the Vista partition active and doing a Vista boot repair and then installing OSS?
Does your laptop have any special features, such as playing dvd movies without booting into Windows, etc.?

If you did a Vista boot repair, how did it boot back into a "blank" OSS menu? Did you reinstall OSS after doing the Vista boot repair?

Did you install OSS from Vista or from the DD cd?

 

I deleted the hidden partition. The only partition is Drive C:\ with vista on it. Now with this setup with only the one partition I installed OSS and it still didn't recognize vista, it gave no OS in the OSS menu. See my previous post.

 

So there is now only one partition on the drive and Vista is installed on it. I assume it boots correctly into Vista when OSS is not installed.

Is this the same partition that Vista was on before?
You didn't reinstall Vista from scratch?
Is the previous small partition now unallocated space?

After deleting the small first partition, did Vista still boot or did you have to do a repair to get it to boot?

I'm running out of ideas. If you could wipe the drive and do a clean install of Vista, it would be interesting to see if OSS would install and detect it okay. Depending on what dvds came with your laptop, you may not be able to do this.

I have created a "fake" Vista entry in my OSS menu that boots into Vista okay, but I think it only works because a valid entry exists and a valid bootsector exists.

If you wanted to try this you would have to install OSS from Vista. Then, assuming it doesn't find Vista, edit the bootwiz.oss file and add the following blue part to the <oses> section. Make sure to change the Partition ID to whatever ID is listed in the bootwiz.oss file for the Vista partition (red).

Code:

<partitions>
		<id[COLOR="Red"]2132738300[/COLOR] begin="63" crc="36865" disk="4094322141" fs="ntfs" number="1" serial="1e9d1d3ad01d3ae8" size="488392002" type="7" />	
</partitions>

<oses>
		[COLOR="Blue"]<id3126695142 boot_as_ms71="0" boot_as_os2="0" boot_cd_entry="0" boot_partition="[COLOR="Red"]2132738300[/COLOR]"  icon="icon_sys_vista" language="english" lba="1" name_template="Windows Vista" nthide="0" os_type="ntvista" uninstall_info="1" use_manual_disks_order="0" write_boot="1">
			<partitions>
				<id[COLOR="Red"]2132738300[/COLOR] active="1" />
			</partitions>
		</id3126695142>[/COLOR]
</oses>

The problem is that OSS creates subdirectories in the BOOTWIZ folder and stores the bootsector data and other information. I don't know how this links to the actual OS entry or how to create it if OSS doesn't do it.

The bottom line is, you may not be able to get OSS to work correctly on your computer in its current configuration.

OSS seems to work well (at least in my testing) on a "clean" install of Vista, but throw in recovery partitions or ANYTHING else and it seems to balk. Even installing Vista after XP doesn't always work. Sometimes OSS just refuses to find Vista no matter what you try.

If you have any other thoughts or can do a "clean" install of Vista, please post back. If you do get it to work, post that back with that too, it may help someone else.

If I had a system identical to yours, I could run some more controlled tests. It's hard to find a problem when you can't recreate it. Everything I've tried has worked correctly.

 

After I deleted the hidden partition it would boot to vista without a repair. Its working with dual boot now xp and vista. Here is what I did for the time being. First the unallowcated space at 1-1 I increased its size to 12 gb and assigned a drive letter to it. Then with DD I made that partition active and hid my 1-2 drive c:\ with vista on it. Then I put the 3 cheat files on drive c:\ root. I installed OSS from vista next. Now OSS found vista so I went ahead and installed xp on the first partition. Everything was then working. Next I deleted the 3 cheat files and modified the files in OSS for vista. I deleted the 3 files in there and put C:\bootmgr in there place. For now OSS boots either OS. Maybe this will work until DD and OSS get an update. I can't think of any other way to get it done right now. I had tryed a fresh install of vista but with the oem disk the computer freezes after the first boot durring the install process. Thanks for all your help and time, and I'll post if I experiment anymore.

 

Well, at least you have it working...

It's interesting that the "cheat" method worked for you. There've been posts that it didn't work with build 2,160. Probably the reason it's working for you is because OSS is not detecting Vista at all on your computer.

Is the OEM disk a regular Vista OEM dvd or a Branded OEM disk (HP, Dell, Toshiba)? My Vista dvd is the standard Microsoft OEM version.

Usually, the freeze after the first reboot on install (in both Vista and XP) can be avoided by choosing the option to have Windows (Vista or XP) format the partition during the installation process.

 

It must be a disk Toshiba puts out. It doesnt even have an option to format before installing. I hate it having a preinstalled os. It would be great if I had a copy of a regular vista disk.