Using Acronis startup recovery manager with Dual boot vista and Xp

The problem I am having is that I am currently using windows XP and acronis TI 11 home. I have backed up my OS to the acronis secure zone. Which I can acess when pressing F11 at bootup with the activated acronis startup recovery manager. I knwo that activating the startup recovery manager modifies the MBR to allow F11 at bootup. But, I ran into a problem yesterday that when I also installed Vista onto my second partition, the vista bootloader takes over. So, that was not a problem. So, now when my pc booted , I lost the F11 function becasue the bootloader was rewritten, But I had access to the dual boot menu from vista. Letting me choose which OS i wanted to boot to (XP or Vista). So, I booted to vista. Then had the idea that since vista had the new bootloader, i will install acronis on my vista os and then reactivate the startup recovery manager rewriting the bootloader. BUT, Did not work. Does anybody knwo how to do this.
I want to Have a Dual booting setup using xp and vista, BUT with the f11 option prior to choosing which os to boot to. Is this possible with acronis TI 11?

BTW I have the intel p965 chipset with RAID 0 for my OS's and using F11 durin just my xp install, prior to dual boot. The linux based recovery manager had no problem detecting my RAID 0 setup on the intel matrix controller. But yeah, that still does not help me figure out how to get F11 prior to dual booting Vista and XP.

HAHA, also, i found a bug in the software. When you activate the startup recovery manager the "F11". My pc wont allow me to boot if I have a USB external HD plugged in. It goes through a continues reboot after teh "F11" is displayed. Once the USB HD is unplugged, all boots fine.

 

As far as I know, the ASRM should be able to be used in situtations like this. Have you tried reactivating it from XP or from TI booted from a CD?

 

Hi

Where I think you are having the problem is that Vista gets kind of tricky with its disk selection. What I mean by that is Vista's disk labeling may not agree with XP's labeling. What you need to do is go into Widows disk management program and see how XP has labeled your disks or partitions. Then go into vista's disk management and see how it has labeled the same disks and partitions. Idealy what happens is when you boot into XP. The XP partition should be drive C and the Vista should be drive D. When you boot into vista the Vista partition should be drive C and the the XP should be drive D. This doesn't always happen, Vista may lable your XP as drive e or f when you have booted into vista. I do believe this is where your problem lies. It's due to mislabeling and it is easily solved by renaming the partitions using Vista or XP's disk management system.

 

No no, the problem is that when the vista bootloader takes over, it erases the fuction for F11. So, when I boot up now, I post, have system diagnostics blah blah, then straight to the vista OS selector. The ability to press F11 is gone now. Even after i try and activate it again in XP, or Vista. The F11 function does not appear anymore. It should not be linked with how vista is labeling the partitions. Because the F11 function comes before any of that.

 

Anyone nikita, any advice??

 

OK, let me try to explain what I think has happened this way. As far as your computer is concerned you have only one drive C: this is your boot as you well know. Now you have installed Vista as a second partition. When you installed Vista, your real drive C: may have been changed in your bios so that Vista which is a second partition of drive c: is now your boot. The F11 is still tied to your primary partition which is XP and is your actual drive c:. You need to check your bios as to which drive partiton is the primary partition. Then you need to check and see how XP has your drives/partitions labeled and then how Vista has your drives/partitons labeled. Make them read the same but at the same time understand that when you boot into XP, XP should show as drive C and Vista as drive D. When you boot into Vista, Vista should read as drive C and XP should read as drive D. All other drives should read after that and Vista as well as XP should read the same.

 

If you don't mind, I would like to add a comment that I should have said in the above comments. When you are working with double boot or tripple boot (for that matter), you only want to install Acronis on one partition. Idealy you want acronis on the original drive C: which in your case is XP. Other things such as Anti-virus and anti-spyware and firewalls should be installed on both partitions. Your backups and restores can all be worked from XP. Your backups all can be scheduled from XP. You don't need or want more than one Acronis installation on a single computer.

 

You're free to setup your computer however you want, of course. However, there is nothing wrong with installing TI or DD/OSS into multiple Windows installations on the same computer. If you have XP and Vista installed and you only have TI installed in XP, then backing up, restoring, mounting, exploring, etc. won't be available to you in Vista. To me, this would be very inconvenient. I need access to my backups from whichever OS is booted.

Also, if you're in Vista (or another XP), any scheduled backups in your "main" XP won't run. You would want to setup scheduled backups in whichever OS is the one that runs the most.

When Vista is installed on an XP system, the XP Active partition remains as the booting partition. Vista takes over the booting from that partition. This should not affect the capability of reactivating the ASRM.

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Cybrnook2002,

You didn't say if you tried reactivating the ASRM when booted to the TI CD. This would get Windows out of the equation as it wouldn't be running.

 

What you say is very true Mudcrab, however I do dissagree with you about installing Acronis on more than one system. I definately agree with you about installing it on the most used system. My recommendation would be to put the most used system as your first bootable system. If it's Vista then make Vista your first bootable system and install Acronis on that system.
Why I say this is that if you have Acronis installed in more than one system, things start getting very hairy, and from my experiance, most people get very confused. Especially if people start useing or are using the Virutal Machine capabilities of Vista. I look at it this way, most people do not do a backup every day. If they do, good for them and they probably won't get confused because they really have it down pat. My experiance says this is not the case. I personally do not have a problem with it installed on one system. If I miss a scheduled backup because I am in another system, I am aware of the backup I missed.

 

Hello Cybrnook2002,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Backup software.

Actually when you activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager the program just records Acronis Loader in MBR. So if you are trying to activate ASRM and do not see "Press F11 key ..." after that the most probable reason of this is something preventing Acronis Loader from being written in MBR correctly. So if you boot under Acronis Bootable Rescue CD and try to reactivate ASRM (as MudCrab suggested) at least you can be sure that there is no any Windows application which can interfere with Acronis True Image 11.0 Home and prevent it from writing to MBR correctly, so please try this if you have not yet.

Following the issue with inability to boot into ASRM when the external drive is plugged here is what I have to say. When you press F11 key (when ASRM is activated) it just loads Linux kernel and acts as if you boot under Acronis Bootable Rescue Media. So please check whether you are able to boot under Acronis Bootable CD with the attached mentioned USB external drive. If it fails to load please try "acpi=off noapic" workaround described in Acronis Help Post. If this does not help please submit a request for technical support with the attached Linux System Information file. Mentioned file can be collected as described in Acronis Help Post. This will let us identify the reason of the issue.

Thank you
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Nikita Sakharov