Disk Director 11 will NOT uninstall no matter what
My mother died on Christmas. Dec 30, before flying back east, I checked an old Yahoo mail account. Sure enough Acronis still sends mail there, DESPITE my having contacted them 3-4 times in 2011 with my current address. I found an offer for TI 2012, downloaded and installed it, immediately leaving town for nearly 3 wks, only to find upon return that Disk Director 10 no longer worked. It froze every time, over & over, requiring a hard reboot to attempt anything further.
Decided to uninstall/reinstall, only to find it wouldn't uninstall. This started a process of 1000 tricks too long to explain here, but 1.5 days later, I finally had removed it. Unfortunately, in the meantime, I'd wasted 2hrs w/ chat "support," who's first suggestion was to reinstall the OS! While this nonsense continued, bear in mind that I'd clearly explained to him that *** the sole reason I wanted to use DD10 was to increase the size of a partition on an ext. drive.*** He suggested buying DD11 as a "fix," which I later found out wouldn't install w/o FIRST uninstalling DD10. Gee, I guess he didn't know that! A day later I finally managed to remove DD10 from my system.
By then, I'd already DL'd DD11...after clearly explaining to him 2-3 times that I'd just paid for a funeral AND my airfare, so couldn't buy it for about 10 days. He said I could use the trial version, do what I needed to do, then buy it in February. ANOTHER BIG OOPS. THE TRIAL VERSION ISN'T FULLY FUNCTIONAL & WON'T RESIZE A PARTITION!! Gee, that's the ONE little thing I needed to do. Thank you Mir. V. Singh.
So, I've now spent another 1.5 days trying to get Disk Director 11 to uninstall -- since the trial version is useless -- and tried everything under the sun to no avail. Late yesterday, I uninstalled TI2012, hoping that DD11 might then finally uninstall...but nope. I've shut down numerous services, killed every process I can, and 100 other things -- nothing gets rid of this crap. This is coming from one who u-s-e-d to love Acronis, but I've had it with this....and I find thousands of posts now citing nothing but pervasive problems.
In the wee hours (I've been up all night) I DL'd two of the best Uninstallers (for poorly made software such as this), yet even they CAN'T GET DD11 OFF MY COMPUTER! This is nothing short of insane that a company would release such crap -- and I've owned & built countless computers since the early 80s + mountains of software.
If I can just get rid of DD11, I will reinstall my trouble-free TrueImage 2010 and Disk Director 10 — both of which worked perfectly UNTIL "upgrading" to TrueImage 2012. If you sense I'm steaming mad, you don't know the half of it. With 1000 things I need to do, particularly having been away so long for the funeral, I come back to this absolutely unnecessary nightmare, which has already wasted 3-4 days of my life. Any company that releases such flawed product should be ashamed.
If anyone knows how to get this crap off my system, it would be most appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Mark:
Thanks for your reply. Interestingly, I've never heard back from Acronis "Chat Support" (to whom I also sent a follow-up email 2 days ago), nor has any Moderator come forth to assist. Isn't that encouraging..
I've considered doing a restore, though resent being forced into that as a "last ditch" option simply because I purchased an upgrade to TI2012, and then all the problems began. My last bkup image is from Dec 8, 2011, so a lot of data has changed since then. I've never had to do a restore, though I'm sure I could manage - yet given how flakey this is now working, what happens if I lose everything in the process? It's quite apparent that the TI2012 upgrade screwed things up system-wide, and that leaves me unsure which way to go.
Only after days & nights of effort did I finally get all Acronis off my system late yesterday, so my TI2010 isn't even installed currently. My thinking was to 1st reinstall DD10, which I did earlier tonight, but now I'm right back to where I was: It freezes my entire system on launch AND won't uninstall! Assuming I can remove it again somehow, then reinstall TI2010, I can't trust it to NOT screw up my system/data during a image restore. Given all the foregoing, why would I have any confidence to the contrary? I'm not willing to risk that, frankly.
Out of desperation I actually considered reinstalling TI2012, simply because God only knows what all it's buried in my system, such as drivers you mention. Yet even assuming it works, I don't want a backup of my system as it exists now, plus it clearly screwed up DD10. So, I'd have to reinstall DD11 (again), yet their cheesy "trial version" won't even resize a partition greater than 100MB! By Tuesday, I'll have money to buy their $50 upgrade to DD11, but it galls me to forced into spending $70 in upgrades, when I'd just like my old products to work as they did -- OR have spent $20 for TI2012 and NOT have it screw up DD10. I guess that's too much to expect. Worse, there's no guarantee that either of these products might eventually work, singularly or in tandem.
Question: tonight I noticed under services.msc, the entry ACRONIS OS SELECTOR ACTIVATOR (Stopped/Manual startup). The way I finally got DD11 trial off was to run the Acronis utility that supposedly "removes all Acronis products." ALL? While I don't see OSS as an installed program, WHY would this entry still be there in services?? This was before I reinstalled DD10 tonight, so the system should've been squeaky clean...according to them.
I'm thinking of buying partitioning software from another company, rather than continue this nightmare. Do you know if competitors (Partition Magic, etc.) are able to manage/ resize existing partitions created by DD10? I'm ready to try something else, since Acronis' new releases are clearly buggy and support is non-existent. Will probably look for more reliable backup software, as well, since this has shaken my faith in them to the core.
Having recommended Acronis to countless friends & family over the years, I now feel almost duty bound to warn them, "If you get an upgrade offer, don't do it; you'll be sorry!" I know I am.
Mike:
You're making the restoration process too complicated. You don't need ANY version of TI installed in order to do a recovery. The best way to restore is from the TI 2010 recovery CD, not from Windows. If you didn't make a recovery CD previously, log into your account on the Acronis web site and download a copy. Burn the downloaded ISO file to a CD. Boot your PC from the CD, which is a stand-alone recovery environment, and restore your Dec 2011 image.
The restoration of the image will also fix DD 10, assuming that it was working correctly at the time you created the image, so you can then complete the partitioning task that you want to do by using DD 10.
If you will post a screen shot (example shown below) made from Windows Disk Management that shows the partition layout on your disk then one of us can give you more specific guidance on how to restore the Dec 2010 image in the simplest and most problem-free way possible.
Mike,
I don't think you've mentioned which OS you are trying to use DD10 on.
It won't work properly on Windows 7