uninstalling arconis os selector- how?

If you only have one OS and OSS is installed in Windows, you should be able to uninstall OSS from Windows and be done.

However, if there are problems, it may be best to uninstall OSS from the CD. This is the only way to force the uninstall if OSS can't find an OS or complains about what it does find. Create a DD/OSS CD that includes the OSS program. Boot to the CD and select the OSS Setup option. Select to Uninstall OSS.

OSS can also be uninstalled manually, if necessary.

In add remove program in the control panel i only see disk director not OSS. Would uninstalling DD uninstall OSS and return my system back?

Richard

Was OSS ever installed in Windows? If it was installed only from the CD, you won't be able to uninstall it in Windows.

Just create a DD CD that includes the OSS programs. You should have it anyway in case anything goes wrong.

I will check and let you know

Thanks

Ric

I was in multi-boot bliss with OS Selector 8.0. I was able to have seven different operating systems to boot from, DOS 6.22, WINME, WINXP (3 different configurations), WIN95 (for DPMS Dos video games), and a testing configuration. OSS 8.0 was very flexible in its configuration; I could edit the text configuration files to effect changes not possible through the user interface such as swapping out hard disks and renaming files within the BOOTWIZ folder subdirectories for protected operating systems. When Disk Director came out with OS Selector 9.0 I thought, "Heck, they may have made improvements that make it even more customizable and convenient."
The worst mistake I ever made! OS Selector 9 completely changed the method of tracking OS configuration changes I could no longer manipulate the properties of each configuration by editing the text files in the BOOTWIZ folder. Every change to the configuration files was erased when the computer restarted. I even changed all the configuration files within the C:\BOOTWIZ\1e903456\boot.ini as well as C:\BOOT.INI and BOOT.BAK and all other BOOT.* files located on my hard drive while running a live CD of XP (in other words, Acronis was not loaded in memory, the system boot from the CD boot sector.) So every physical file was changed to the setting I wanted, and when I restarted again, they were all reverted back to their original data. With 8.0 I could fix ANY configuration glitch that occurred as a result of a power outage or failed installation of XP (and I had to re-activate the Acronis Boot Loader).

Not too long after I upgraded, I replaced my primary hard drive with disk-cloning software Disk Director (something I have done several times with OS Selector 8.0 and met with absolute success) and after the cloning process completed, I powered down the system and removed the old hard drive, connected the cloned drive to the master position of the IDE cable, configured it for master with the jumpers, powered up the system, and tried to boot my main and default OS, XP Professional. The next day I went to load Windows Millenium Edition and after selecting the choice in the Acronis Boot Environment, I was left with a blank screen with a cursor blinking in the upper left hand corner. The hard drive activity light was not blinking but I continued to wait for over two hours, and when I returned the black screen was still there with the blinking cursor. I shut down the computer (CTRL+ALT+DELETE did not restart) and booted up once more. I selected the Windows XP configuration and it booted up normally. After this, I shutdown XP and restarted and tested every other configuration I once had with OS Selector 8.0 and each one failed.

My primary IDE hard drive consisted of XP Pro and Windows ME (20GB - FAT32)
My secondary IDE hard drive consisted of Windows Me and Dos 6.22 (20GB - FAT32)
My tertiary Ultra320 SCSI hard drive was mostly a repository for my downloaded and personal data files. (80GB FAT32)

I then attempted to uninstall OS Selector 9.0, but during the process it asked me which operating system I would like to be restored and there was no option for all of them! I said, "What?" This is completely unacceptable. I still have these hard drives in my system sitting dormant until I can rectify this situation. I occasionally need to reconnect them to access old tax records and old pictures, but have not been able to fix this booting problem. I have written Acronis many times through the years and no one has been able to give me the information requested.

I simply wanted un-upgrade version 9.0 with 8.0, which I was told is not possible. Oh, and the 9.0 version was a trial, so I was literally up the creek without a paddle if I wanted to boot my legacy operating systems. I even tried to install a new installation of Windows Millenium Edition and then copy the files over to the old configuration directories within the BOOTWIZ directory, but that ended up renaming the OS directories and destroying the configurations.

What I want to know is: Why is it possible to install OSS onto a multi-disk system, import the configuration of each bootable hard drive into the Acronis boot menu, but when you uninstall it, you cannot restore the OS configurations back to the drives they were imported from? The method to do this is extremely simple--

Take the directory from BOOTWIZ for each OS, rename it to the proper directories (which is the core of what OSS does at every boot) and remove itself from the boot loading sequence. That does not sound difficult. So why am I forced to choose ONE operating system when I have THREE hard drives that were EACH BOOTABLE drives with intact operating systems? I would be happy with the ability to install OS Selector 8.0 over 9.0 but the installation program prohibits this. Being an assembly language programmer, I tried to determine the process by which Acronis checked and verified if a profile was OK to use, and it was too convuletd to make sense, something which also was a surprise to me. I did not have a boot-time debugger, so I could not debug the bootstrap code within a live Acronis boot sequence, I could only decompile it from a non-executing environment, which never works correctly no matter what the debugger software companies claim.

This is the moment I no longer recommended Acronis for multi-boot systems. XP's boot loader has no problem with booting multiple os configurations although you have to have each OS installation directories renamed for each system. For example XP1 has "Documents and Settings", "Program Files", and "Windows", XP2 has "Documents and Settings.0", "Program Files.0", and "Windows.0", and so on. This scenario is operational, but required remembering which operating system I am using at the time to open the proper document and program directories. I can even install DOS 5.0 and make it an option to boot from within the XP Boot Loader. (I am good with a hex editor and hard drives.)

OS Selector 9.0 essentially destroyed any chance I had of booting from my installed systems on drives other than the primary boot drive.

Apparently, the folks at Acronis assume that once a customer installs their software they will never want to go back to the way things were. This is very short-sighted. I have since been using Virtual Machines to run various test scenarios in an attempt to resurrect this problem and the only success I have met with is to unistall OSS 9.0, which by the way ERASES ALL OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM CONFIGURATIONS except the one you choose to load at boot up. Therefore, restoring my operating system configurations for the remaining configurations should be possible, right? WRONG! Since the imported configurations have not booted with OS Selector 9.0, when I uninstall OS Selector, I am left with a defunct virtual machine--the Program Files directory and Document and Settings directory are not restored to their original locations. I attempted to edit the configuration files that were in text format and that did not work. Upgrading from OS Selector 8.0 to OS Selector 9.0 effectively slaughtered my legacy operating systems.

Thanks, Acronis.