Jump to content

Acronis OS Selector & Disk Numbering


bgrau
 Share

6 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

Finally I got MAC OSX on my PC, after a previous attempt (last year) that led to disaster.

I made the mistake of installing Acronis Disk Director, and the O/S Selector renumbered my Hard Disks (I never thought this was possible as they are renumbered in plain DOS).

I had 1 HD IDE installed first, one of them primary with C: drive. : Disk 0

I then installed 1 HD SATA, and it took drive D:. : Disk 1

Later on I installed another 1 HD IDE, which became secondary IDE, and E: drive. : Disk 2

 

When Acronis took over it reconfigured and swapped Disk 0 and Disk 1, so the SATA is now Disk 0.

 

Fortunately, XP is on Disk 2 (ie E:), so I had to copy the boot loader of XP to the SATA (which now is Disk 0).

 

Anyone knows how to get the configuration back it used to be?

 

Any help apprciated.

 

My System:

 

Intel PIV Prescott HT, 3GHz

NVidia Geforce FX 5600XT

1.5 GB Ram

Sound AC97 + SB Live (only AC 97 works)

Internet: Cable Modem Ethernet Broadband, not yet tested...

2 X IDE, 1 SATA HD's

 

works perfectly, apart from Acronis mishap...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In the manual for disk director (and thus os selector) found here: http://download.acronis.com/pdf/DiskDirect...e10.0_ug.en.pdf

you'll see in section 7.7.4 how to select the order in which the drives will boot. OS Selector should have followed the order the bios gave, that would have made more sense, but from your experience it seems it ain't so (unless there's other things going on, don't know).

 

(anyways, when you add other drives, you might also see a change in letters for partitions, the first active partitions for each drive taking the letters c:, d:, e: etc in turns, and then the others take the rest; of course you can change those letters latter in drive management.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank 4 reply cbmkgd,

In my case my BIOS does not give me the option to choose a boot order of hard disks. I guess the SATA is considered by Acronis as naturally the first drive to boot from (mine is formatted ntfs), but the IDE is split intio two:

2 Gigs FAT16 and the rest AF (MACOSX).

Thanks I have now forced Acronis to start with the IDE instead of the SATA, I will still have to amend the boot.ini to point to the correct partition where XP is...

Take care dude...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It was not that easy to bring back my system to the way it was.

Arconis O/S Selector has the bad habit to write the MBR and Bootsectors of Partitions...

In case someone encounters the same difficulty, this is what I did to get my system the way it was:

1. Uninstall Acronis.

2. Re-install (repair) Win XP.

3. In XP, hide the partitions of the Disk 0 which has been renumbered using Partition Magic.

4. Reboot to DOS (now DOS can boot because the Disk that contains it has become Disk 0).

5. Use Partition Magic in DOS and unhide the partitions in 3.

Now the Disk Numbering has become what it was...

And I could use my IDE which contains OSX and boot to OSX...

Morale of the story: I will never use Acronis O/S Selector again!

Cheers...

4.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I want to add that on my system acronis os selector (aoss) never played with disk boot order without my explicit consent; it obeyed my bios by default.

 

Just out of curiousness, and to learn about the quirks of aoss, what is on your disk0? Or more generally, could you list the disks (0, 1, 2...) and the partitions on each with their file systems (fat16, fat32, ntfs, hfs, etc...), and what os you have on what partition?

I'd like to reproduce this quirk in vmware and see why it happened.

Note that WinNT/2k/xp have their own needs about which drive they'll dump their bootloader on, and that might add some complications that aoss tries to compensate (maybe inadequately).

 

I personnally hide any other os/system partitions when adding another os -- especially windows -- and also disable any boot manager: that way i can test the new os by itself first, and then later re-enabling the boot manager to take care of business. I can then isolate problems, rather than search if it's the boot manager or any other detail that is at fault.

 

I'm absolutely not an inconditional fan of aoss, nor any other boot manager. I'd recommend using the darwin bootloader or even the chain0 method over aoss. But right now aoss manages well my tests OS's on my pc, although eventually I'll be on grub exclusively.

And then there's vista to test and its own bootloader... or not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi dude,

First off, the Disks number swap was only showing off within Acronis O/S selector, or if I used a win 98 rescue disk, then running partition magic will show me that Disk 0 and Disk 1 were swapped, so that the SATA has become Disk 0 and the IDE Disk 1.

However when I managed to boot to XP, all the drives and partitions looked the same, unless you look at the ordering in O/S Selector.

Maybe you can replicate this in vmware by having one ide and one scsci drives.

These were initially before using o/s selector:

Disk 0 - IDE Master - Partitions Fat16 and AF - C:DOS7 and I: (using MacDrive) MacOS (Active)

Disk 1 - SATA Master - 2 Partitions NTFS - Primary D: and E: - 1 Partition Extended NTFS F:

Disk 2 - IDE - 2 Partitions NTFS - Primary - K: (Win XP) H: Primary

Apart from AF, all other partitions non active.

 

After using O/S Selector, it swapped Disk 0 and Disk 1, and made the first partition of the new Disk 0, which is now NTFS Active.

So I could not boot XP anymore as the bootloader was not on that partition... etc

I got fed up, removed it and fixed it back the way it was.

I also found a patch for the mbr that allows me to circumvent the return toi the boot menu when selecting MAC OS X

Btw My PC is a Dell Dimension 8300, a bit modified...

Thats it

Peace out

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...