Poll: Reason for buying DD.

I am curious as to how many purchasers bought DD to enable dual booting.

A second related question is, How many of those with Vista have OEM versions? OSS doesn't work with those.

Dave.

 

I purchased DD to use OSS for a boot manager. I found it while searching and researching and decided to try it over the others because of the features and pricing. I wasn't even really wanting DD, but found it to be a great tool.

OSS will work fine with Microsoft OEM DVD Vista installations. It does have problems with "Brand-name" OEM installations (Dell, HP, Compaq, etc.). This is supposed to be addressed in a future build. Until then, they can be manually added to OSS. However, some recovery features may be lost depending on how the system boots.

 

Thanks MudCrab.

It may have been clearer if I had said "brand name" instead of OEM. That is what I am after.


Dave

 

I bought DD10 for the sole purpose of multi-booting A factory built image from OSS (OSS from Acronis could not do this and I had to use their 'copying' utility to finally accomplish this task).

Nonetheless, I found DD10 to be very useful for a multitude of other tasks and consider the cost justified for these ancillary utilities.

Windows XP seems to have all the capabilities for multi-booting built in ( I was just not aware of this then).

Even with the visibleness of their partitions to each other I have found that with a little craftiness (and OS imaging capabilities just in case of failure) these XP partitions were almost as good as 'hidden' partitions if configured 'right' ( limited user accounts ect.) if due caution is practiced when using the internet in conjunction with using good anti-maleware countermeasures.

DD10 "proper" could be used in liew of OSS to hide partitions if one wanted to.

Indeed If one is versed enough with Windows, DD10 is not even needed for multi-booting XP and other Microsoft OS's at all for most purposes.

Over time it had become a hobby of sorts in-and-of itself (as it posed a puzzle like challenge to finding workarounds to get it to perform adequately).

Over all I adopted it as it proved itself to be malleable enough to overcome it's deficiencies.

As for Vista I am confident that with persistence the same utility can be got from DD10.

 

I bought it cos i lost ALL my user data after what I know now to have been Windows Disk Manager losing the links between partitions. I could still boot so I googled 'recover partitions' and researched a bit.

I liked it so much and was so greatful - it restored everything - I bought TI too and that has been a God send for me as well.

 

I got it because I am a long time Acronis TrueImage and DD user and the upgrade price wasn't bad. I like Acronis TrueImage as a backup and I find DD the best of it's type of program. Other than the OSS troubles described below, I think they are very reliable.

I have to say that I don't know that I would recommend OSS for use with Vista. It can only be set up correctly under very specific conditions that I believe MudCrab has posted somewhere on the forum.

I installed it on my laptop to dual boot my existing XP partition with the new Vista partition. The main reason I went to the trouble because I wanted to start learning Vista without burning my bridges and one of the bugs in Vista is(was?) that, when it looks at an XP partition, it sees the system restore files as corrupt files and deletes them. If you set up OSS to hide the XP partition when you are in Vista, it doesn't see them and doesn't mess with them.

I am back on this forum to try to figure out how to remove OSS. I'm just going to go with Easy BCD, a freeware program that's pretty good. I'm doing this because I've spent the last day without a laptop because OSS went haywire. It acted up once a few days ago and didn't boot right. When I stuck in the Acronis rescue usb thumbdrive I created as per some instructions around here, it looked like it had fixed itself. Then, yesterday while in the middle of a six hour drive I got a call and needed to look something up. It gave me the dreaded missing bootmgr.exe message and I haven't been able to get it to boot until just now, about 24 hours later. I'm still not sure what I did that worked.

Tried using the usb key again, but that never even got me to a menu. Tried the rescue disk to repair the oss installation, but that didn't help. It never would let me change options or uninstall oss. I tried hiding and unhiding and making active the various partitions hoping to hit one that would boot, but no luck.

I then tried the Vista DVD (BTW, don't know if it's oem or retail. It's an upgrade from Microsoft through their partner program.), but that kept saying it couldn't repair no matter what options I tried. I went into the command line and used Diskpart to see what things looked like. I set the Vista partition active from there. No luck.

When I went back into DD, it showed that the XP partition had been deleted so I had it recover that. DD did it with no problem.

I then went into true image and had it restore the MBR from a backup. Then I started getting a different error message about the mbr before the missing bootmgr.exe message.

After giving up awhile, I was going to try to copy onto the Vista partition the bootmgr file which I found on the small partition on which OSS had been installed. I booted from the Vista DVD again. I thought what the hell, lets try the repair again while I'm at it, and it said restart to finish repair. And here I am.

I still am going to try to remove OSS and just use Easy BCD. I'm far enough along in the transition from XP to Vista that I don't really care about the system restore on XPand I should have an easier time recovering if there is another problem.

 

I started first with True Image and later added Disk Director in order to have partitioning utilities to replace an aging Partition Magic program.

I was never interested in OSS. I tried it out and found it too slow and too buggy, so instead I rely on GRUB as a boot manager. GRUB can do anything but it has a command-line style interface that requires a little bit of geekyness to appreciate, but once learned it really can do anything.

I have stayed a fan of DD because I think that the combination of the partitioning tools, disk editor, and file editor that is built into DD is the best available at the moment. But PartedMagic is nipping at DD's heels...