OS Selector problem after installing Linux distro
With Acronis OS Selector installed under Windows Vista x64 and activated, I rebooted my system and installed, from the DVD drive, the Linux distro CentOS 5.3 into its own /boot, /, and /home partitions and I instructed the distro to put its boot loader in the /boot partition and not in the MBR.
Everything went witthout any error and at the end the distribution had me remove the DVD disk and reboot my computer. When I did this the Acronis OS Selector gave me a message about "No configuration file" and "<Enter> to reboot" but no matter what I did I could not reboot into any OS.
Why did this happen ? As explained above the CentOS 5.3 distribution should not have affected the MBR in any way.
I was able to recover and get the Acronis OS Selector to reactivate itself, and was subsequently able to boot back into all my OSs. But that was scary have the boot manager not function on my system.
If anybody can point me out what happened and what I need to do next time so that I do not loose my ability to boot into my OSs, it would be appreciated.
I don't know the exact installation procedure you used, but it's very normal for an OS installation to cause a boot manager to need to be reactivated. The main thing is to have a boot CD already created so you can reactivate your boot manager (OSS, in this case).
I've installed Linux quite a few times (mostly Ubuntu distros) and have found that the "don't mess with the MBR" options don't always work. In fact, on my main Linux computer, GRUB usually doesn't install correctly at all. I usually have to do a manual install after I install the OS.
I don't know the exact installation procedure you used, but it's very normal for an OS installation to cause a boot manager to need to be reactivated. The main thing is to have a boot CD already created so you can reactivate your boot manager (OSS, in this case).
I've installed Linux quite a few times (mostly Ubuntu distros) and have found that the "don't mess with the MBR" options don't always work. In fact, on my main Linux computer, GRUB usually doesn't install correctly at all. I usually have to do a manual install after I install the OS.
I have the boot CD already created so I can boot from it and reactivate OSS if it shows me an error. Still I would like to think that OSS will not temporarily die on me each time I install a new Linux distro. I have done so in the past with a previous boot manager so I was a bit miffed that OSS somehow got confused. The previous boot manager I used, which was quite good for many years, is no longer being sold and its last release is not even supported for x64 systems, so I went with DD/OSS. Generally I am very pleased with the functionality of OSS, but I really hope I don't have to use the boot CD when the partition tables change on my hard drives. I am pretty sure the CentOS 5.3 x64 install would not change the MBR as long as I told it to install itself in the /boot partition I had previously created for it, but I will leave this problem for now until something similar happens again, since I am up and running and OSS now boots fine with all the OS s I have installed.