A Digital Age Deserves A Digital Leader

Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Forum rules
Please start your own topic for support with problems you experience. Even if it appears to be exactly the same as someone else's problem, system configurations differ significantly. Thank you.

It may take our support staff between 24-48 hours to respond to your problem. We are a small business and strive to answer your questions as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience.

Re: Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Postby shreader » Sat Feb 16, 2013 2:50 am

Welcome to PROnetworks Tronar.

One can clear/reset their CMOS (BIOS) using the little motherboard jumper, its a 3 pin plug & one just moves the bridge overone place to the clear position for 5-10 seconds. This will reset the BIOS to the defaults.

Be sure to turn-off the PC & unplug it before moving the jumper.
This guide recommends removing the battery also.

http://www.computer-how-to-guide.com/mo ... bios-rese/

Hopefully this is all you will need to do.
Software Director
User avatar
Posts: 6715
Joined: Mon Aug 12, 2002 2:25 am
Location: Huntington Beach, CA

Re: Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Postby Tronar » Sat Feb 16, 2013 12:14 pm

Addendum:

I just made another attempt to solve the issue by myself.

I uninstalled OSL2000 from the MBR, rebooted, deleted the OSL2000 directoy on C:\ once more, wrote a new standard MBR, shutdown the computer, took out the BIOS battery, waited some time, started the computer again, configured the BIOS again (including setting the time & date), booted up the computer, installed the latest version of OSL2000 (9.27 platinum), entered my registration code, got a success message and rebooted again to finish the installation.

Guess what: I still get the "version mismatch" error message.

I don't know why Littlewoods got his problem solved by deleting the BIOS, but apparently that doesn't work for me.

In addition OSL2000 still remembers the amount of reboots I have done with the OSLoader, so the waiting time for the nag screen gets longer and longer. Ironically about 50 reboots or so were only performed to try to deal with the registration problem. I also don't understand why a newer version is incapable of overwriting the code of the older version by itself. Or why the older version didn't uninstall itself completely in the first place.

Anyhow, I am at my wits' end. Unless someone can help me here with a working solution, I will request a full refund next week. Maybe that gets the attention of this disgrace to the shareware community.
PRO New Member
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Feb 15, 2013 8:19 pm

Re: Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Postby Tronar » Sat Feb 16, 2013 12:28 pm

shreader wrote:Welcome to PROnetworks Tronar.

One can clear/reset their CMOS (BIOS) using the little motherboard jumper, its a 3 pin plug & one just moves the bridge overone place to the clear position for 5-10 seconds. This will reset the BIOS to the defaults.

Be sure to turn-off the PC & unplug it before moving the jumper.
This guide recommends removing the battery also.

http://www.computer-how-to-guide.com/motherboard-troubleshooting/clear-the-cmos-bios-rese/

Hopefully this is all you will need to do.

Thank you very much shreader. I didn't see your message at first (when I wrote my addendum), because it was on the next page.

Are you saying that taking out the battery is not enough to reset the BIOS? You also have to bridge that jumper?

Because according to the instructions either way should be sufficient. And since my computer had forgotten all its BIOS settings and even forgotten the current time & date, I guess the BIOS reset by taking out the battery was successful, right?

So any other ideas?
PRO New Member
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Feb 15, 2013 8:19 pm

Re: Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Postby shreader » Sat Feb 16, 2013 2:56 pm

You are correct, either the battery or the jumper will work.

I have never used either of the boot managers/selectors you are referring to, just want to keep my system simple i suppose.

At this point, if it was mine, I would probably just forget about the boot selectors & do a system restore, repair or just backup files & reinstall w7.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... epair-disc

First I'd try a restore from a point before the trouble started, if you haven't already or have one going back that far.


*Maybe someone else here will have some input on this that has used these apps.
Software Director
User avatar
Posts: 6715
Joined: Mon Aug 12, 2002 2:25 am
Location: Huntington Beach, CA

Re: Dual Boot Windows 7 - Windows Vista - and/or Windows XP

Postby Tronar » Sat Feb 16, 2013 5:55 pm

Well, both of my Windows partitions work perfectly, so except for the boot manager giving me trouble there is no reason to roll back anything. I just need something at the beginning of the boot process to select which Windows I want to use and to hide the other primary partition with the other Windows on it and then boot the selected OS. It's not rocket science, but I want the Vista partition being completely hidden from Windows 7 and vice versa.

I also strongly doubt that a rollback (or even reapplying one of the backup-images) would change anything about the boot manager. That thing writes itself only into the MBR and doesn't even create an entry in the Install/Uninstall area of the control panel. So I highly doubt that System Restore or any other regular Windows tool or will be able to do more than the Uninstall-Routine of the setup.exe in the C:\OSL2000 directory does.

I even overwrote the MBR (where the bootmanager supposedly installs itself too according to the website) with a standard one. If that doesn't get rid of any remnants, I don't know.

I read through the entire FAQ at osloader.com again and the developer mentions that RAID systems can create trouble sometimes, although he isn't really specific about it. I am running my system on a simple RAID1-cluster. But the boot manager works perfectly on it. Only the registration process fails, which keeps the nag screen increasing the nag time after every reboot. But the boot manager itself works perfectly as intended. I don't get it how you can write such a tiny perfect boot manager that completely fits into the MBR (which can't be that easy to accomplish) and then completely mess up only at the registration part of the software.

Anyhow thank you very much for all your tips. I will send the developer another message warning him about the impending charge back and if he fails to respond to that message, I will uninstall that software for good and look for alternative boot managers.

Which is a shame, because that boot loader fulfills all my criteria for a boot manager and my first search for alternatives didn't produce anything as small and simple to configure as this program.
If only the registration process worked as intended, everything would be perfect.
PRO New Member
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Feb 15, 2013 8:19 pm

Previous

Return to Windows Boot Problems

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests