How to Find and Create a Copy of the BOOTWIZ.OSS File
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Introduction

The Acronis OS Selector (OSS) program keeps track of the OS installations in the BOOTWIZ.OSS file. This file is installed in a hidden BOOTWIZ folder on the partition to which OSS was installed. When manual changes are needed to make OSS work correctly on a computer, the BOOTWIZ.OSS file needs to be edited. Creating a copy of this file as a plain text file allows editing to be done without affecting the original and also allows the file to be submitted on the Acronis Disk Director Support Forum.

Instructions

If you installed OSS normally from Windows or from the Disk Director CD, it will default to using the booting Windows partition for its files. If you selected the Custom installation option, the files will be on the partition you selected during the installation.

If OSS is installed into a partition that is currently hidden from the booted Windows system, you'll need to boot into the Windows system that uses that partition. For example: You have XP Pro and XP Home installed. Each one is setup with the other's partition hidden. OSS is installed on the XP Pro partition. In this case, you will need to reboot into the XP Pro OS to have access to the partition which contains the OSS files.

The BOOTWIZ folder is a hidden folder. In order to have access to the folder, you'll need to enable viewing of hidden and system files.

Detailed instructions on this procedure can be found here.

Browse to the BOOTWIZ folder by clicking on the Start button and then on My Computer (in XP) or Computer (in Vista). The folder will always be in the root directory of the partition (for example: C:\BOOTWIZ).

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The main BOOTWIZ folder will contain many files and usually several sub-folders (depending on how many Windows operating systems you have installed). An example is shown below.

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The BOOTWIZ.OSS file can be seen in the directory listing.

To copy the file, right-click on it and select Copy from the pop-up menu.

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You can now paste the copy into the folder of your choice (My Documents, for example) or into the BOOTWIZ folder. Move the mouse cursor so it's over white-space and not over any existing filename, right-click and select Paste from the pop-up menu.

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If you're running Vista with UAC turned on (the default), you'll need to provide administrator permission to copy the file. Click the Continue button in each window.

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To make working with the copy of the file easier and to allow attaching it to a post on the Acronis Support Forum, rename the copy to BOOTWIZ.TXT. Right-click on the copy and select Rename from the pop-up menu.

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Type in the new name and press ENTER.

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Confirm that you want to change the filename extension to .txt.

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The BOOTWIZ.TXT file is now available for posting on the forum or for editing without the risk of corrupting the original file.

To verify you have found and copied the correct file, a sample (opened using the Windows Notepad program) is shown below.

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If you're following these instructions to be able to post the contents of the BOOTWIZ.OSS file to the Acronis forum, please DO NOT PASTE the contents into the post. Instead, please attach the BOOTWIZ.TXT file to the post.
Last updated on 08-17-2009
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