Urgent!!!

First off, I had Acronis Os selector for about six months and using it to boot four hard drives (XP home, XP Professional, XP and another XP Professional). They have all worked great and never had a problem with the Os selector till tonight. Installed a new hard drive and my bios detected it as well as OS selector. I have one drive that is set up as my main drive and Acronis Os selector has its own partion on that drive also. Proceeded partitioning the new hard drive for Vista (500 G Western Digitial drive/Sata) with disk director suite and everything went fine. Created the new parition and rebooted the new pc with the Vista DVD. After Vista finished installing and required to reboot, it popped up with an error message and rebooted (couldn't get the message). Since Vista disabled booting with my other four drives, used my Acronis OS media builder disk and reactivated OS selector. It successfully activated, but each time I click on one of my XP installation I receive an error message for Acronis saying: "Error: Acronis OS Selector was unable to load XP file system Operating System: Error." Keep in mind all drives were working fifteen minutes before I started installing vista so not for sure how to repair the situation. Any help or advice will be appreciated (except the format and reinstall excuse) and please I don't want to have to go back installing everything again for all four drives.

 

This is most likely due to the fact that Vista really doesn't like a DD formatted NTFS partition. I run into the same problem so I usually just reformat the partition with Vista as part of the installation process.

Is the current booting drive still the same as it was when all the XP installations were working?

Were the XP partitions hidden when you installed Vista?

Do you Hide your XP partitions from each other or can each XP see and access all the other XP partitions?

Do you use the "Disk Order" (disk swapping) feature of OSS with your XP installations (make each one think it's Disk 1)?

Have you checked all the Properties for each XP OSS entry are still correct?

Do you have a backup of your partitions (with TI, for example)?

I don't know why OSS would have changed any of the XP OS settings so I'm assuming it had something to do with installing Vista.

 

-Yes the same drive is the boot drive because I had to reactive Os selector after installing vista to even access my xp drives.

-No, I did not hide my XP partions and did not know anything about hiding them.

-To my knowledge, no I do not use the disk swapping feature.

-I have not checked if the properties are still there for each operating system (not for sure how to). Do know that all of the data is there from inserting the xp disk and checking it from there.

-Not for sure what T1 is.......

-Possibly, but do you know of any way I can access my XP partions again? I can do without the vista one at the moment since it does not have any real data on it but don't want having to reinstall all of my other drives with all of the data.

-Also how do you make a quote show up in your replies??

 

Re: Follow Up

To clarify on things, once I installed windows vista my xp partions will no longer boot with Acronis OS selector. After vista finished installing it's boot loader (which it does by default I think), I reactivated the acronis Os selector and it showed all five drives as being bootable, but none of my XP drives will boot. They (XP drives) all respond with "Error: Acronis OS Selector was unable to load XP file system operating system: Error." I am able to boot into my Vista drive and by checking the other hard drives, they all have the windows folders and the files inside so assuming that vista moved the files around so acronis could not read them?? Any help or feedback will be appreciated (other than formatting and reinstalling).

 

Vista probably started taking over the booting process of all your XP installations because the partitions were visible. Then, when it couldn't finish due to the reboot error, the state was left unfinished.

If not, then the disk(#) value in each boot.ini file should be different (one per disk).

At the OSS menu, right-click on the menu entry and select the Properties option.

TI is short for Acronis True Image. Imaging programs will allow you to backup and restore disk and partition images.

Can you post a screenshot of what Vista's Disk Management shows? I suspect it took over the booting XP drive.

In fact, all the XP installations may also have been booting from that disk.

For the first XP, I'd boot to the XP CD, enter the Recovery Console and run the following commands (<ENTER> means to press the ENTER key).

Code:

fixboot <ENTER>
fixmbr <ENTER>

That should return the drive to the standard XP booting setup and that XP should boot automatically (OSS will have been disabled, at this point).

To add a QUOTE, you just need to put the tags around the text. You can click the "Quote" button to see what it looks like. Basically, it's like this:
{QUOTE}text to quote here...{/QUOTE} only use [ and ] instead of { and }

If you want to reference the poster, then you include their name:
{QUOTE=MudCrab}text to quote here...{/QUOTE}

 

for your windows xp partitions, check your drive letters. Your problem can be as simple as changing a drive letter back to it's original configuration.

In your configuration with a multiboot harddrive you might need a "boot corrector" that can fix each xp partition seperately without touching the MBR.

If you have an older computer you can try the demo "justboot corrector" which can read the registry from a non-booting xp partition. It can at least rule out a drive letter problem for you. That version is 2 years old and doesn't work on all the latest computers.

I think your problem is fixable, I've always been able to fix windows xp to bootup.


http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/JustBoot_Boot_Corrector_38938_p/

 

Honestly, I did not know anything about hiding my drives from one another while installing a new operating system. When first installing OS Selector, set the option to protect data from being over written when detecting new operating systems. Also from what the limited Acronis Instructions that were available, hiding your drives seemed like an option to protect your data from being accessible to other people who use your pc (not as an necessary option to install additional operating systems).

Each drive does have one, but some are easier to get to than the others. For example, the drives which I do not have as the main default drive have it visible from just clicking on the hard drive in vista, but the main hard drive I have the OS selector installed on can only see the boot.ini from within Os selector on start up.

At the moment, only three drives are visible on my Acronis OS selector screen (yes the bios detects all five drives). The main drive the Os selector is installed on is unbootable due to a missing file error. The vista drive I can boot into and one of my XP professionals drive can be bootable also. The other two drives are missing from the Os selector screen.

Do not know how to post a screen shot of it since it's the boot menu (black and white wiht Vista and boot legancy windows installations (XP). Other words, where will the screen shots be saved at and how will I go about making one? The drive hasn't technically bootable up yet so doubt the print screen key would work.

The vista hard drive was brand new and just added last night. For the past six months, everything has been working fine so vista did do something to the existing drives. From what the Acronis Instructions told me, you have ot set one drive as the main boot drive and the other drives as another type of drive that can only be bootable from the Acronis Os Selector screen.

Only two drives were available from there and that was the two missing drives. Neither one of them were bootable after using those commands due to them only being bootable from the OS selector screen to my knowledge.

I hope everything is fixable and appreciate your time. This does not mean to sound rude or anything of that nature, but I doubt a email from me telling Acronis how limited their instructions are to installing Vista and playing nice with other operating systems is very limited. After searching on this page, it seems a more complex procedure then ever and it involves more than just installing an operating system and activating the OS selector again.

 

Any ideas or suggestions?? I know this thread is considered old by now and I honestly dont' want for it to be ignored. I would be willing to stay online if somene could walk me through the steps on how to make Acronis OS selector function as it should (multi-bootloader).

 

You do the screenshot from Vista. You said you could boot into Vista. Click the Start button, right-click on Computer, click on Manage and then on Disk Management in the tree on the left side.

Correct.

I think it is fixable. It's just a matter of figuring out the best approach.

Multi-booting is a complex procedure and can easily be destroyed. I recommend creating backup images of any disks involved prior to make changes to working setups.

 

I wouldn't consider any thread in the DD forum "old" until at least several days passed.

Can you please provide some more information?

The screenshot from Vista's Disk Management.

When the XP booted properly, were they all C: when they booted or did each one have a different drive letter?

Could you access all the other XP partitions from any XP boot?

Do you know which partition OSS is installed to?
If so, can you please make a copy of the BOOTWIZ.OSS file, rename it to BOOTWIZ.TXT and attach it to a post? (It's in the hidden BOOTWIZ folder so you may need to enable viewing of Hidden and System files to find it.)

Do you have an image backup (like with True Image) of the partition that has OSS installed on it? I assume that this is one of the XP partitions, possibly the first (booting) hard drive.