DD 11 Home OSS Multiboot more than 4 Windows Vista or 7 from one disk

It was possible with DD/OSS 10 if you modifed the boot sector of the Logical partition so it would boot and (if I remember correctly) you manually added it to the BOOTWIZ.OSS file. I haven't tested how OSS 11 handles it.

If the above method would work with OSS 11, you would need to have a disk editor since it was removed from DD 11 Home.

Did OSS 11 find Windows on the Logical partition and add it to the menu? Do the options look correct (Logcial partition selected as the booting partition, etc.)?

Regarding the error, have you checked that the BCD file on the Logical partition is pointing to the Logical partition? It may not have been updated as part of the conversion. This has to be done manually since Windows will not automatically do any fixes on a Logical partition.

MudCrab,
Thanks for your quick response. I have read several of your posts and website info about this and I saw the info about hidden sectors on logical partitions. I had done more experiments after I got the winload error with no success. So yesterday after your post I decided to try again from scratch on a new hard drive so I could report the exact error to you and check the BCD file. But this time, instead of installing the 4th operating system on a primary partition (as recommened in the OSS instructions) and converting to logical, I just made it logical in the first place, and was able to install Vista on it, and get it to work. Now I have 3 primary partitions and two logical partitions, each with its own Vista, and it works perfectly. I did not have to use any other partition tool. I will continue to add more logical partitions and operating systems.

There was one trick to adding the operating system installed on a logical partition to OSS. See steps 9 - 17 below.

Here is what I did:
1. Install Vista Bus English on a new 500 GB hard drive in a 30 GB partition. (This is for software testing and we don't need a lot of space).

2. Install DD11 and OSS. Setup OSS to boot Vista Bus English.

3. Install Vista Bus French in a new primary 30 GB partition.

4. Boot back to English and add the French to OSS.

5. Repeat for Vista Bus German.

So now we have 3 primary partitions with Vista on each.

6. Next, create a new 30 GB logical partition with DD11.

7. Boot to Vista Bus Japanese and install it on the new logical partition. After install, you can see the Vista boot loader for Japanese and the original English.

8. Boot back into English.

9. Open OSS.

10. Execute the OS detection wizard from the Tools menu.

11. Leave the default "Detect OS on partition" checked.

12. Select the new logical partition. The Next button is still disabled.

13. Click the Bootable button. The Next button is now enabled.

14. Now if you click Next, no operating system is detected.

15. Go back and select the first partition, then click Bootable.

16. Now select the new logical partition again. The Next button is still enabled.

17. Click Next. Now a new operation system is detected.

18. Finish out the wizard, then rename the new selection in the boot menu as desired.

Now you can boot into the logical partition from OSS after boot.

Repeat steps 6 - 18 for each new Vista. I will also add Win 7 installs, which I think will also OK. This is working just the way I wanted it to.

Interesting procedure, but don't the booting files end up on the Primary partition?

By the way, an update to DD 11 Home was released today. I haven't had time to try it yet, but according to the release notes it now has a lot of the missing features back (including the Disk Editor).

MudCrab,

Thanks for your response. Yes, I think the boot files are on the primary partition. But as long as I could boot all of the operating systems, it's no problem. I saw that update, too, so I installed it immediately.

FWIW:
When I added a Windows 7 system, OSS automatically detected it when I started OSS in Vista. Then I upgraded to the new DD 11 update, which uninstalls OSS. After I re-installed OSS, there was only one selection in the boot menu. OSS would not detect any new operating systems, even using the trick I used before. So I booted a Vista DVD and executed bootrec /rebuildbcd from the command line. Then OSS was able to detect all of the selections - I just had to rename them. But one of the Windows 7 systems would not boot - there was an error for winload.exe (0xc0000428 Windows cannot verify the digital signature). I deactivated OSS, then did another bootrec /rebuildbcd. Now both of the Windows 7 systems would not boot using the Windows boot manager. Then I found a post in another forum on how to fix the 428 error using "bcdboot :\windows /s c:". That fixed the Windows 7 boot problems. I decided to install EasyBCD. This program makes it easy to change the descriptions for each boot manager selection and change the order. After bootrec /rebuildbcd, all of the selections have generic names with (Recovered) at the end, so all of the names need to be updated. Of course, the Windows bcdedit program can be used for this, too. I had to use that to change the boot manager locale back to en-US after installing a foreign version of Windows.

This was a good learning experience for me. The reason I wanted to use OSS in the first place was to be able to boot many Vista and Win 7 systems from one hard disk for testing. Before trying OSS, I had tried to use the Windows installer to install on logical partitions, but it would not let me create a logical partition, so I thought maybe it was impossible. Now I know that if I create a logical partition first, then I can install Vista or 7 on it, and the Windows boot manager handles all of the selections.

Now I have 11 systems installed on separate partitions using the Windows boot manager. I can backup and restore the entire setup using a second hard disk with Acronis True Image.