Finding cause of Windows Image Backup not working (hanging) after uninstalling Acronis
Thank you Acronis for the lousy huge waste of my time because Acronis does not uninstall properly. I oversee an office's computers and when I needed to restore a system, the full backup was not there! Oh, it had some differentials (a weird set that didn't make sense) but no full backup to refer to....great. Luckily I had a recent clone to work from, done on a 2 drive dock. So I switched backup software because this failure at a critical time is enough to not trust it ever again. I Installed Paragon Backup, which passed my extensive testing and set the schedule. All was well....until I uninstalled Acronis TI. Now Paragon couldn't complete its backup. Then I tried Windows Image, and it hung forever. I had already run the Acronis cleanup utility and removed the registry entries as noted in the instructions. After MANY hours wasted using process monitor and cloning test drives I found Acronis had hijacked "Volume Snapshot" registry with one of its "filters" entries. The key was [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{533c5b84-ec70-11d2-9505-00c04f79deaf}] "Class"="VolumeSnapshot" and the fix was to delete the value "fltsrv". If you using this to fix a similar error, just delete the entry "fltsrv", not the key! In retrospect this was an obvious place to look, but the error was not surely known to be related to Acronis removal, thinking they would have a proper uninstaller. Ha, I guess this is the punishment for uninstalling their software.
