Severe problems related to OSS Selector removal

I am trying to remove OSS Selector without destroying my ability to dual boot Windows XP Pro and Windows XP Pro 64 Bit. I am using the upgrade of Disk Director 10 that is supposed to have 64 bit support.

After building a new computer (described recently in Extreme Tech in an article called "Best Bang for the Buck") I had multiple problems installing Linux and have found it impossible to install new operating systems with Acronis Disk Director because DD does not seem to detect my DVD Drives.

This is a PC with two SATA drives and two IDE DVD drives. I successfully installed a dual-boot system with XP 32 and 64 bit. My difficulties with Linux related to the fact that, after the Linux install disks booted, there was an error message that indicated that the program could not find the DVD drive from which it booted!

I finally solved this problem by booting the Linux distros from an external USB DVD drive, and had to do this with several distros - Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Suse, and Xandros - until finding a distro that worked.

Problem #1: Uninstalling previous Linux distros would not get rid of traces of them, presumably their boot loaders. Even when I used an XP disk to fixmbr and fixboot, when Acronis OSS was reinstalled, it still detected Linux distros, usually one new Linux distro every time OSS restarted, along with one "unknown operating system". Clicking on the resulting penguin icons would give an error message related to a problem with GRUB.

This problem persisted even after doing fixmbr, fixboot, completely reformatting and repartitioning the SATA hard drive, and reinstalling XP and XP 64 bit.

Problem #2: Uninstalling Acronis OSS from within Windows results in only the XP 64 bit Windows bootable, and even reinstalling OSS will not detect the XP 32 bit install. NTDLR is missing, and I can't find it.

How do I completely get rid of OSS as well as all of the stray GRUBS and LILOS on my hard drive that persist even after fixmbr, fixboot and a complete format? Thanks.

 

I found partial answers to the above questions on other forums.

Apparently there is some sort of difficulty with certain operating systems properly recognizing something called a JMicron drive controller that is present on my ASUS P5B motherboard. Most Linux distros that I am aware of, even the newer commercial products, do not detect the DVD drives when that controller is on the motherboard.

There was an article in the new issue of Smart Computing that discussed the specifics of how to use a Windows XP install disk to fix several boot problems, including the one that has always scared me the most, the one referring to a missing NTLDR. There is something in the process of removing Acronis OSS that causes this error when you have been booting more than one XP installation.

I am not quite certain about the extra Linux penguins that show up except to guess that perhaps Acronis "sees" partitions formatted for Reiser or Linux Swap as Linux installs, but this has not been an issue for me in the past on an older computer.

Until the issue with Acronis and the P5B ASUS motherboard is resolved, presumably related to the JMicron controller, I cannot use OSS to install multple operating systems. I now triple boot XP Pro, XP Pro 64 Bit, and Xandros 4 Professional Beta with the Linux boot loader installed only on the Linux partition. The only two distros that I have found that work with my motherboard are Ubuntu and Xandros 4 Professional Beta. Suse 10, Mandrake, Knoppix all do not work.

 

First make sure you uninstall OSS using the uninstall OSS option - in theory this should put all the XP boot files back where they once were.

However, this doesn't always work. If NTLDR does get wiped/not restored correctly then the easiest way is to use your XP CD choose the REPAIR option not the Rescue/Command Line option - XP will then remove all it's system files, then re-install them remaking the boot.ini and MBR in the process.

You will then be able to boot back into Windows and your nasty little grubs should have disappeared.

Colin

 

Thanks! I thought I had tried that before and the result was a loss of my ability to boot XP 32 bit as well as inability to use the repair function (I tried to repair XP 32 on the c: partition but gotthe warning message from the XP install disk that I should not install XP on a partition that already has an OS installed).

My temporary solution is just to "hide" the extra Linux operating systems that come up, and everything seems to be working.

 

Using the repair option with my xp64 disk after uninstalling OSS did bring me back to a startup screen that offered both xp64 and xp32.

Reinstalling OSS once again detected a Linux as well as an "unknown operating system" in addition to xp64 and Xandros. Unfortunately, this time xp32 did not show up in the list of selections.

I once again removed oss and restored the dual boot option for my xp64&32 using the recovery console and bootcft /list option. After that, I reinstalled Xandros and am now triple booting successfully using Xandros' LILO boot loader.

I think there is some difficulty with my hardware playing nicely with oss. Also, I was foolish enough to install Vista RC1 on my computer, and completely getting Vista off of the hard drive is unexpectedly difficult. Despite multiple hard disk formats and fixmbr's, as well as following instructions for getting rid of Vista's boot loader, I think it has somehow left an indelible scar on my hard drive that is confusing oss. Or, just as likely, I don't know what I am talking about.