Acronis Virtual Disk Bus (vididr): How removing?

Unless the Acronis device class filters and the Acronis services have been cleaned out of your OS registry's HKLM\SYSTEM branch, you do NOT want to remove the Enum entries until they are. (See http://forum.acronis.com/forum/27907#comment-86342 for details.) On the other hand, if those Acronis filters and services entries have been cleaned out of the registry, then any residual HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum registry keys really don't matter. They can stay there without hurting anything and, in some cases, they may even remove themselves after a reboot or two.

The only way I've ever found to delete HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum registry keys manually under Vista or Win7 is to boot to a Windows PE environment with full SYSTEM access privileges. Otherwise, it can only be done programatically through using the correct API calls. There's simply no way (at least none that I've ever discovered for recent Windows versions) for a normal admin user to change ownership or permissions on Enum registry keys. If you discover a way, please let me know.

Have you tried doing the uninstall from within the Device Manager? Right click on the Virtual entry and check your options.

GroverH wrote:

Have you tried doing the uninstall from within the Device Manager? Right click on the Virtual entry and check your options.

there is no option to uninstall only to disable.

What you see in the Windows Device Manager is mainly a reflection of device class entries in the registry. That's the first thing you should check for any extraneous device class filters, etc. Be VERY cautious about removing anything else until you're 100% certain that the DiskDrive and Volume device classes are okay. After that, the next thing to check would be to see if any Acronis "required for boot" (start=0x00000000) services entries remain in place.

Richard Virtue wrote:

They can stay there without hurting anything and, in some cases, they may even remove themselves after a reboot or two.

Nodoby can be sure if it hurting anything or not. I' m still investigating which programs/devices are hurting my system. I started uninstalling suspicious softwares first, any Atih is definetively one.

Mean time, at least one small success:
read:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/24314#comment-86562

and explain me, why I could passed a virus-scan after having uninstall atih? I'm not an expert, I can not eplain it to anybody, I see only the results and this is important to me. May be you know something more?

Actually I would be very interesting to know what this virtual disk bus is doing? whats the purpose of it?

Joschi4 wrote:

Nodoby can be sure if it hurting anything or not.

Well, okay. I can only speak from my own experience, of course. The device class filters and services are much more critical as mentioned, but I suppose it's possible that extraneous Enum entries might confuse something else. In any case, except via WinPE, I can't tell you how to get rid of Enum entries manually. Sorry.

Nor can I possibly provide any "insider" information about why ATIH might conflict with antivirus software or anything else in particular. (You do understand, don't you, that most of us here are just fellow users like yourself.) But low-level drivers that bypass the operating system's own hardware abstraction layer and its normal control of storage devices might have something to do with it, I suppose. Based on other reports in these forums, it certainly appears to have some adverse effects on the range of storage device types (USB, NAS, SSD and some RAID configurations) that can be properly recognised and handed. So anything that might try to access them, whether for antivirus protection or any other purpose, would be likely to be unhappy about it in the circumstances.

Richard,

Could you please explain me, for my understanding what this virtual disk bus is doing? whats the purpose of it? Or give me a link to read about it.
thanks.

As I understand it (strictly UNofficial and subject to correction by one of the Acronis reps here) the Acronis Virtual Disk service is just used for mounting and handling a *.tib image file as a virtual disk to which an unused drive letter is assigned and which is then capable of being browsed just like any other drive using the Windows Explorer. And I believe that the virtual disk service may also play a role in Acronis Try&Decide operations, but that's purely a guess.

If you're still worrying about that surplus Enum key in the registry, build yourself a bootable Windows PE setup using something like WinBuilder and get rid of it that way. (See http://reboot.pro/ for downloads, examples and instructions.) It's really not that hard and a highly worthwhile thing to learn about. Any WinPE version (PE1, PE2, or PE3) will give you the needed SYSTEM access and privileges. And you only need a very basic PE build that includes regedit for mounting and editing the system hive in question.

Richard,

I found a way to get permissions on Enum Registry and get delete HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum registry keys manually. But, I do not recommend nobody to do this! As you wrote in your entry:

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28115#comment-87077

Acronis get deeply system permissions and this will harm the system. Now I understand why I got sometimes Bsod, while all my softwares and system components are working well, except of Acronis, which I got regularly in trouble.

You can image what happend after I've deleted the acronis enum entries?