OS Selector seems to deactivate itself
I have a dual boot system with Win XP and Win 7. Win XP is located on drive 0 in a primary partition, Win 7 is installed on drive 1. For installation I removed either drive 0 or drive 1. After having both systems work standalone I installed OS Selector on my Win XP, activated, rebooted and everything worked fine as expected. I got a boot menu and was able to either boot XP oder 7. (Both OSes work in AHCI mode)
Unfortunately after some boots the OS Selector didn't show up but XP tried to boot without success. It just hangs, booting in protected mode also did not work, system hangs, no blue screen.
When I boot using the True Image Rescure Disk I am able to recover the XP MBR, then XP boots without problems. I can reactivate OS Selector, do some successful boots of either XP oder 7, but shortly afterwards the same happens again. XP trying to boot without success and hanging. Once I got an OS Selector message "No System found".
Anyway, after recovering the MBR XP boots in either case.
I suspect that OS Selector deactivated itself. I found the issue with OS Selector going to "expired trial period" and removed all older installations of True Image and Disk Director, reinstalled the latest versions (DD #2121, TI #6696, TI+ #6696) in suggested order. Still same behaviour.
Any suggestions?
Gerhard Wilhelms
This is my disk layout reported by DD:
Drive 1 (MBR)
system reserved 100 MB primary MBR NTFS
C: 931,4 GB primary MBR NTFS
Drive 2 (MBR):
local volume E: 97,65 primary MBR NTS
Data F: 498,5 GB logical MBR NTFS
Obviously I booted Win7 on drive 1. For it was my first installation I did no partitioning myself (like your recommendation) as with my older XP installation where I had the system on C: and data on D: which is seen as E: and F:
So far no more deactivation for one week.
I have to admit that I have no idea how an automatic defrag could happen, so nothing done regarding this.
Run the Task Scheduler in Windows 7 and browse to Task Scheduler > Microsoft > Windows > Defrag. Windows 7 normally has a defrag of all volumes scheduled once a week.
Done! Defrag was scheduled to run every Wednesday. This week I worked mostly with Win XP, no further problems so far.
Thanks for your suggestions and help!
So far no new problems, it seems you were right. Thanks for your help, MudCrab!
gerhard: do not disable the automatic defrag - it's there for good reason!
the one and only proper long term solution is to install OSS onto a dedicated partition. i had just observed similar problems and - with the help of mudcrab - i seem to have fixed it. see http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9542
it's a shame that the installer of OSS still allows you to install it onto a windows partition. it leads to a "known issue" because of defrag file movement. the installer should give a clear warning and automatically provide options to create a dedicated partition for OSS.
Acronis should update the program so that the files being moved doesn't cause a problem. However, I seriously doubt they ever will.
Some defrag programs will allow you to excluded files/folders so they don't get moved.