I was able to get a copy of Acronis OS Selector at a fairly good price and decided to use it to dual boot my Sony VAIO laptop. I currently have and am very happy with Mandrake 9.1 -- will likely go to 9.2 when it comes out fairly soon. Here is my question ... Mandrake recognizes and is able to read the CD read I load it into the CD Reader yet will not execute it. Is it possible ... say it isn't so .. that it wants windows to read it. I do know it needs FAT to reside on. It is a bootable CD but will not do that until a FAT partition is there for it to reside on. Is an answer to set up the FAT partition using Mandrake's Partioning Tool ???

the last version of acronis i used was version 5
but
that required a windows environment to run the .exe in, which then in turn made the installation floppy

(do you know anyone with a windows box ???)

First you don't need to purchase an OS selector to dual boot. You can use Lilo or Grub, they both come with Mandrake. Mandrake also has partition management tools, diskdrake.

But if you want to buy an app to do this then it may be that the app that you are trying to use is a WIN32 ap and you would need to be in windows to execute it. or if it's a bootable CD then you would just put the CD into your CD drive and reboot, if your BIOS is set to boot from CD.

I think that you are right .... it needs windoze to run in. I got it for next to nothing at a computer show ...thought I would try it. So much for Acronis.l I have dual booted using Mandrake's as well as Red Hat's partitioning tools before and they do indeed work just fine. Appreciate the replies and .... thanks again. -Emmett

...Or are there? Anywho, I don' think you had to BUY the program. I found a link:
http://www.perfectdownloads.com/wind...s-selector.htm

and it links to this:
http://www.acronis.com/files/osselector8.0_d_en.exe

So, yeah, it looks like you got gyped $30 or whatever you paid.... Unless, of course, that's a demo, there's only 1 way to find out, I guess....