write boot sector in general properties acronis disk director 10

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After weeks of hard work, I finally got windows xp, windows vista and windows 7 to boot using Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 - Boot Manager.

All of these operating systems are on my FIRST hard drive.

On my second hard drive I installed Mandrake Linux 2010. To my chagrin, after the installation it would not boot. I instructed Linux to boot the boot information in the primary Linux partition and NOT the MBR.

This has worked with other boot managers (system commander) in the past. Acronis disk director suite 10 is the ONLY boot manager I found that supported booting windows 7 along with windows vista and windows xp.

No other boot manager (that I could find) would support windows 7. The windows partitions boot fine.

I checked the general settings for all my operating systems (4 of them, 3 windows - that boot fine on the first hard drive and 1 Linux partition on the second drive) all partitions are PRIMARY.

The only difference I found with the Linux general settings is that "Write Boot Sector" was not checked off.

It was checked off for all the windows partitions.

I'm afraid to check it off for Linux, because honestly I don't know what it means. I worked for WEEKS getting the windows partitions to boot, and I don't want to put a check mark on a setting for Linux that will render everything unable to boot.

Can someone shed some light as to what "Write Boot Sector" means - in as plain english as possible, and if the absence of that check mark may be the reason Linux won't boot.

Again, I'm booting Linux out of the root partition, not the MBR.

Thank you so much for your help and insight into this.

Bob

mar 10/11/2009 - 15:32
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Bob,

There is very little information on this in the DD manual (section 7.7.2).

When OSS detects an OS on a partition it will make a copy of the boot sector and save it. The option you're asking about will rewrite the saved boot sector back to the partition before it boots that OS.

In most cases, OSS will default to having this option enabled for Windows. However, unless the boot sector changes between boots (very unlikely), it's not needed.

When OS entries are added manually to the BOOTWIZ.OSS file (Windows 7, for example), this option is not normally enabled. I leave it that way because OSS doesn't have the file. However, it doesn't seem to cause a problem even if it is enabled because OSS can't write a file it doesn't have (no change gets made).

I would leave the setting enabled for your Windows OS entries IF they were auto-detected. As far as I know, this setting is not normally used for Linux. None of my Linux entries even have the reference to the file so the setting is meaningless. I would leave it unchecked (disabled).

I hope this information helps. Please realize that it's just my understanding of how it works.

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Regarding booting into Linux, it's quite possible that GRUB (or GRUB2) didn't install correctly. Every install of Ubuntu that I've done from the later versions had this same problem. A manual installation of GRUB to the Linux partition fixed the problem.

mer 11/11/2009 - 05:43