Uninstall DD causes W7-64 to fail booting
Greetings to all on this great help forum,
Needed to increase size of W7-64 OS partition. Rather than using MS Disk Manager I thought about using a more professional software hence DD. Unfortunately I did realize after install when reading release notes that the version of DD did not support W7 (probably forgot to upgrade my copy of DD).
So I proceeded to uninstall of DD then rebooted as requested. A BSOD briefly appeared and then rebooted again. At next step I was offered a repair which I proceeded with. After a long time (±20 minutes) the system told it could not fix but did not note the reason. Tried to reboot but did not work.
Could someone help me in explaining what happened and how could I restore the PC to working condition. Many thanks in advance.
Max
Hello MudCrab,
Thank you for spending some of your expert time (I've browsed the forum and seen many times how you helped other users. kudos)
To answer your questions:
1. I haven't tried Safe Mode booting yet as I suspect a corrupt MBR. I am currently on the RE via W7 DVD booting and the startup repair has finished to no success. Should I stop there and try Safe mode ?
2. Because the initial need was to recover space from the C: partition to get W7 running better (partition size is 120 Gb but the user has stored too much data in his profile so W7 was running like a dog) and then shrinking partition D: (residing on the same physical disk) to reallocate the space to C:, I have set Restore point space to minimal size. I cannot remember if this has let at least one restore point in the system.
What is your advice ?
PS: Attached is the first BSOD that appeared after rebooting further to DD uninstall. Sorry it is in FR but BSOD don't tell much whatever the language !
Hello again
I'm responding to myself to update on progress.
Against all odds and against my incorrect belief that multiple attempts would have compromised suggestions made earlier, I am pleased and somehow surprised to report that booting to Last Known Good Configuration was successful. I am now back in operation and checking system health.
Thanks again for your basic "Rule of Thumb" suggestions that are too often missed when deep diving into problems. Obviously the sign of a knowlegeable and wise person.
Take care MudCrab
That error is usually caused by the snapman driver. You may want to check if the driver is still being used. For example, if the uninstall didn't correctly remove the driver, going back to the last good configuration may have it running again.
What build of DD 10 did you install?
Hi,
Where one would usually find this driver ? Since I uninstalled the software I can't really tell which version it was and I'm not keen to install again to find out !
Is there a utility to do the clean up ?
TIA
There isn't a utility to remove DD 10 from Windows 7. DD 10 was never designed to be run on Windows 7.
You can look in C:\Windows\System32 for the snapapi.dll file. Also look in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers for snapman.sys. These should have been removed when DD was uninstalled. However, if these files do exist, they may not be in use (installed).
Run the Registry Editor and browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet and then search (Ctrl-F) for snapman. If the driver is still installed, you should see several UpperFilters entries with it. For example: PartMgr snapman or VolSnap snapman