So… I’ve installed Windows 8 Developer Preview on my desktop machine. And, like usual for Windows installation programs, it overwrote my MBR with it’s own code, overwriting my Acronis OS Loader code. Unfortunately I don’t have the installation CD by hand, but I remembered it wrote it’s reinstall.com to an SD card. So, Windows 8 still offers to create an MS-DOS boot diskette when selecting the format option on a diskette. So, there we go, activate the boot loader again.
Windows 8 Developer Preview didn’t complain about being installed on a drive not being the primary master, and it booted itself fine with it’s own bootloader. What it fails at is, listing otehr operating systems, even Windows operating systems, (there were 4 of them on the primary master) Well…. it seems Windows 8 Developer Preview has put it’s complete bootloader in the MBR, and none in the boot sector of it’s partition, causing the OS Selector to fail at booting it. Well…. at least… that’s my “diagnose” for now. I guess I will have to play around with booting from the cd in rescue mode, get a command line and force it to write it’s boot code to the correct partition.
Windows 8 behaves like it’s the only Operating System on the machine, completely ignoring even previous versions of the Windows Operating System… and being booted by a third party OS manager, which is required when trying to set up a multi boot since it didn’t offer this option itself, also fails.