Unknown Operating Systems in OSS

When I added a second hard drive and OSS booted up it added 2 Unknown os to the list, one for each logical partition. DD shows the 2ed drive correctly 2 60G logicals F: and G: with a small 7.8M unalocated at the very begining (I guess this was automatically set\needed (by FDISK) years ago when I first set it up).

Of course, my first inclination is to just RightClick delete the Unknown os in the OSS menu, but should I also delete the F:\Bootwiz\context.oss file that was created? In which order, if it matters. Will OSS keep putting them back on the menu? I read the similiar post from May23 but it does't really talk about the deleting these Unknowns safely.

To play it safe I would leave everything alone, but this problem is also preventing reading my 2ed CD ROM, the I: drive. The H: DVD ROM still works. The CD ROM was fine up untill the 2ed HD was added. I tried >removing the CD on the >System Devices and rebooting to auto install, the CD is put back in the table and in fact it appears to work, the reading LED flashes when a CD is inserted. But when I click on I: in MyComputer get the error "I:\ is not accessible.

BTW, the dual boot win98\win311 is working great, set up like this:
D0# 1G w31os | .8G logical | 30G w98os | 30G logical D1# 60G log| 60G log
The last thing I did was hook 2ed drive up (it is 2/3 full of data!). I am being extra carefull with that data, it has survived two C: mechcanical crashes (most is burned to CD\DVD but not all). The .8G logical in the middle works great to transfer files between w31 and w98.

Just a little gripe...
Why cant Acronis fix this? Seems relatively easy for OSS to detect a new added on hard drive as 2 logical partitions not 2 Unknown os. DD detects them properly.

go man go MangoMan

 

This is kinda wierd...

I got the CD drive working (haven't done anything with Unknown os yet). I went into win311 os and got the DVD and CD both working using good old MSCDEX.exe and when I went back to win98 the CD started working. Dont know why\how the hidden misconfigured win311 os could block active win98 os, there must have been a good reason way down in like dma irq bios cmos stuff. (The BIOS setting were correct all along and didnt change.) I thought OSS was blocking the CD somehow.

So, I am not too worried about the OSS Unknown os, but would still like to know how to safely clear them whenever they come up.

MangoMan

 

mangoman,

As long as the Unknown Operating Systems listed in the OSS menu don't reference any of your valid OS partitions, you should be safe to delete them. (Check this under the Partitions part of the settings for the OS.)They may come back and they may not. If you delete the bootwiz.oss files/directory from the 2nd hard drive partitons, OSS will recreate them most likely. Do you know if any OS's were ever installed on the 2nd hard drive? If so, then there is probably info in the MBR and possibly in the partition boot sectors that OSS is finding.

Just curious, but what order did you end up going with when you setup your DOS/Win98 dual-boot? Win98 first and then DOS or the other way around?

The CD drive problem makes me wonder if Win98 is booting from the DOS partition. OSS can handle this, but it would mean they are not "isolated". However, if it works correctly for what you want then don't make any changes on my account. If you did want to check it, you could comment out the support line for the CD drive in the Win3.11 setup (in the autoexec.bat file) and then reboot into Win98 and see if the drive still works.

 

Hey MudCrab,
I started with a clean win98
resized and installed win311 on the 1st 1G
got OSS to see them both
resized the end of win98 for a 20G logical
finally resized the front of win98 primary for a .8G logical between the 2 wins.

win311 can only see the .8G
win98 sees the .8G as D: and the 20G as E:
Which was lucky because I made the E: first then the D:, but both win311 and win98 see the 2ed logical made as D: I though I was going to have to fiddle around with them some more, but this is what i was after.

I am leaving the 2 Unknowns in OSS alone for a while, till I know more about this. Normally, it bugs me not to clean something like this up, but if I have to start over and reformat my hard drive again because of an unclear DD\OSS command, I will suffer a complete breakdown (not just on my computer). I just want to install my apps and get back to what I was working on.

Thanks again for your wisdom.
mangoMan

 

oh yeah...

The 2ed hard drive has always been 2 logicals, almost possitive I never had an os on them. Does each drive have a MBR? If the only MBR is on the first drive, it was wiped clean, I did all my dual boot experimenting with 2ed data drive physically disconnected and I reconnected it last. There is that 7.8meg of unallocated at the begining of 2ed drive that might be confusing OSS, this is what I want to view and understand before I delete the Unknown oses.

 

Each drive has space for the MBR, but not every drive has code written there. Boot code is also located at the beginning of a partition (the bootsector). That is where GRUB might be, for example, in a Linux partition.

The 7+MB of unallocated space at the beginning of your 2nd hard drive is the "marker/alignment" for the beginning of the "extended" partition container which holds the logical drives. It is completely normal. It has nothing to do with OSS's unknown os's problem.