Acronis has turned my computer into a boat anchor!
Last month just before my vacation, I decided to upgrade my software. When I rebooted my PC I was greeted with the BSOD and a message indicating that the snapapint.dll was missing. I've tried to boot into safe mode but no luck. I've tried repairing with Windows XP Home setup disc but no luck. Of course I tried to recover using Acronis (F11) and the irony is my Acronis products do my no good. I can get to the drives via DOS using Ultimate PC and BartPE. I can even see the drive using the Seagate tools (which uses a trial version of Acronis) but I can't save changes or doesn't do something correctly. The drive is a Seagate SCSI drive, BTW.
I suspect the Windows registry has some entries that's keeping Windows from loading. The tools I have to edit the registry are a little too low level for my practice not to mention I haven't a clue what hive to load or what entries to change.
I'm down to two options -- 1) try to reinstall Windows on another partition or 2) just buy a new computer and rebuild. I just keep resisting the idea of rebuilding.
Any ideas?
First, I'm not an expert. If you have a full system back-up, then start-up from the Acronis recovery disk as described above if you can (you can also download the latest build 6528 recovery ISO from the Acronis Web-site, burn that to a CD and use that. Prior builds are probably fine since it's XP). If you don't a have good full back-up, then it's probably best to re-install all of the software (I did that once or twice over the years with XP, and it's like having a new computer) and make sure to format the hard-drive on re-install. I always keep a back-up computer on hand, and using a KVM switch, you can switch between the computers, so you don't have to do the re-install all at once. Since you are using XP and if you want to continue to use that (I did for 11 years and miss Outlook Express) then I suggest finding a copy of Norton Ghost 9 on Ebay, and use that for back-ups in the future. Don't use the newer Norton software. They became very complicated, like most of these back-up utilities. Not that Acronis doesn't work but Ghost 9 is simple and works great!!! I've never used the incremental features on any software, including Ghost 9, as I've always had troubles over the years with incremental back-ups. Including Windows system restore with its restore points on, on every computer that I've ever used. Both on Win XP SP3 and Win 7 Pro, with brand new Lenovo and Dell computers.
As an alternative and/or before doing a complete re-install of all software (maybe also get a new HDD if you do that), I've found the tech support at Staples excellent, and reasonably priced, and you could bring it there.
I had the same problem (missing snapapint.dll error) on Vista after turning on Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (that enables "F11" recovery on Windows startup). Fortunately, after booting into Recovery Manager it was possible to switch this feature off and revert to the previous working state.
Then I resolved the problem by making links in C:\Windows\System32:
mklink snapapi.dll "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\SnapAPI\snapapi.dll"
mklink snapapint.dll "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\SnapAPI\snapapint.dll"