Unimaginable pain
Just want to share the horror that Acronis True Image inflicted on me. I upgraded a 1TB to 2TB SSD on my system and because both were Western Digital I got the available registered copy of Acronis True Image from their site. Installed it, created a USB boot and used it to clone my drive.
So far everything was great as would be expected from Acronis which I've used many times over the years.
However, I didn't need it installed anymore so I tried to uninstall it through control panel. Nope....uninstaller froze.
OK, I searched up how to uninstall it and was directed to this cleanup utility:
https://kb.acronis.com/content/48668
That one froze trying to kill the Acronis services.
I started to look to see what exactly was installed. There were multiple services, hundreds of registry keys, many apps and drivers and files all over. And Qt, because of course they chose to use that framework for a cross platform UI. In the course of trying to protect me from malware, Acronis True Image became the very thing it was meant to protect me from.
Booting into safe mode, and removing all instances of anything with "Acronis" from my drive and from my registry. For a moment it looked like I had rid myself of this nightmare. And on next reboot...... Windows can't boot. Tries to auto repair itself but can't. Tried to fix the master boot record, to no avail.
The only thing left to do was to re-install Windows from scratch.
Hours and hours of pain and misery. All because "Acronis True Image" came with some "protection" services that I never asked for. That I never agreed to. That wouldn't go away no matter what I tried.
Shame on you, Acronis, for this. I had so much admiration for you in the past. And now, this.
Alex

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Hi TomF,
Except that it's a clone of the original drive. And the clone itself contains the installation of Acronis Cyber Protect. Because I had to install Acronis in order to create the clone.
Alex
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Alex, I do not recall similar issues being reported for either ATI itself or OEM versions.
Without more information it is difficult to say that ATI is responsible for the inability to boot your PC when it apparently booted before you stated manually editing the registry. Assuming you made a backup of the registry beforehand, have you tried recovering that backup?
On the incomplete uninstall. I would have done a repair installation of ATI. Then used the cleanup tool; I am assuming that the cleanup tool is compatible with the OEM version you used; the knowledge base article does not discuss compatibility with OEM versions.
Ian
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