I’m killing time. Right now I’m waiting for updates and downloads to complete on my office work computer, a machine that I went to great trouble to make bulletproof. For example, I run a top-end Intel SSD and have a disk image backup.
Today, my machine gave me a BSOD after uninstalling a troublesome program. Acronis Enterprise Server. So, just to help people who might have issues or are considering using this program, I though I’d write about it while I wait for the updates to complete, since Acronis forced me to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 Professional.
This is one of this cases where a program started out great, then as corporate weaslism takes hold due to the success, the program becomes more bloated, fragmented, dependent on more libraries, license tiered, and overall more difficult to manage and less rewarding in actual use.
At my office we used to love this program, because it had a great feature that allowed you to image your disk to a state where windows didn’t have anything except the generic/basic boot drivers installed, allowing you to image to another mobo/processor combination. This days are long gone and we’ve relegated Acronis to the scrap heap because it has become an enterprise level mess in more ways than one.
I still had Acronis on my main work machine, but this morning the background program for it started doing weird stuff, utilizing a lot of CPU space. My usual checks for malware/virus came up zero, and I had no explanation for why the Acronis background server program was using a lot of CPU cycles. So, I decided to uninstall it.
Big mistake, HUGE mistake.
After uninstalling Acronis, I found I was in a boot loop, and right after the Win7 animated logo, I’d get a BSOD. Safe mode – same thing, and attempts at OS repair (using Windows tools and third-party tools) came up with no success at all. I also thought it might be related to a recent bungled Microsoft patch which causes a BSOD boot loop after Windows update installs it and the user reboots for the first time, and downloaded the removal tool as a bootable ISO to burn to CD. No joy there either.
I’ve never had the de-installation of a program hose the operating system. Never.
It makes me wonder what sort of “tentacles” Acronis attached to the OS without telling me. So, needless to say, Acronis is now permanently off my list, especially since I had used it as a backup program to keep a disk image. My backup image included the Acronis program, so since trying to remove it caused the problem in the first place I was in a no choice situation – a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro was the only way forward.
I spent the entire morning on the mess Acronis created, and I’ve not got a single thing done today other than deal with that mess.
After a fresh install of Windows 7, which gets me back to the desktop, but of course I have a lot of work ahead putting programs and files back into place, along with 147 Windows updates, and likely more after that.
I know many of you will throw out the standard gloating snippets like:
- Get a Mac
- Run (pick your distro) Linux
- Run FreeBSD or CentOS or some other OS
etc…
…with tales of fantastic other-worldly levels of reliability, so let me just say in advance that until this incident, I have had wonderful reliability with Windows 7 and I have far too much invested in programs and systems to move. So, those aren’t options for me.
Thanks for killing time with me while I wait for the updates to download and install.
I have to reboot now to finish. See you in a few hours.
Legitimate technical reasons why Linux on the desktop is not ready for prime time and may never be,
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#TLDR
It seems the fate of every good piece of computing technology to be hijacked by marketing and muddle-management for maximum, short-term profits by adding stuff that only marketing people want; want because they lack an understanding of the useful purpose of the product. The result is bloated products, escaping to the market before they’re fully developed and even moderately tested.
Marketing will tell the herd of consumers what they want. The herd will stampede towards the abyss under the illusion that a bridge will be built before they get there. The herd doesn’t look back and doesn’t notice the ground slipping away in its tracks. 🙁
Don’t buy into the hype from the Mac faithful. I have several friends who have various model Macs and they have problems too, ranging from 2 new SSDs in less than 6 months to complete system failures and, most commonly, blank lifeless screens. Of course Apple will fix all this stuff, sometimes free, and sometimes for lots of money, and always fairly quickly. But it still breaks.
Someone said earlier there is no perfect OS, and they were right. Most people swear by XP, and I have seen it working really well in a number of machines – it really flies on my father in law’s old PC for example, but for me it was the OS from hell. On the contrary Vista is considered awful, but for me it has been uber stable and just all round excellent. Glary Utilities may be the killer app here . .
As for backups and disk images I learned during the XP years of hell never to back up the OS, just the data, because by the time the OS has been corrupted by disk failure or some evil squid software the disk imager will have simply stored up all the faults, and when you recover from an image file you just replicate the almost but not quite unusable just before disaster state of the computer. Even Macs benefit from a good spring clean now and then.
God Bless Microsoft
If they produced software as reliable as Mainframes (where I cut my teeth), then I wouldn’t have a job.
So many bugs, so many BSOD’s – only one me
Andi – Microsoft Certified of course
Gotta say, Win7 is probably as close to the perfect OS as MS is ever going to get. When it came out we actually had some XP machines that ran FASTER with 7. Although, the company I was working for didn’t have XP, they skipped that and stayed with 2000. Now, Win2K was a great OS then. But… not 10 years great.
Win8 will never be installed on any hardware I own.
Linux is awesome. As a server OS. All my servers use it, and I’m quite adept at getting it to run and play nice with Win machines on the network. There was a learning curve for getting web servers up and secure and optimized, but I can practically do it in my sleep now.
Then Mac. They’re good for…. um… people who don’t know much about computers? Gotta love those one-button mice.
I’m an ancient piping designer. When things go wrong this badly, I go back to wet memory to fix things. It takes a looong time.
Just kidding. I now backup all my stuff on multiple drives via Time Machine.
I’ve been a fan of BootIt Next Generation from TeraByte Unlimited for many years. I tried Ghost in around 1997, but couldn’t get it to work properly. BootIt NG has a slightly geeky interface, but all you have to do is follow the instructions. What’s important to me is that it worked first time and has never failed me, so I haven’t bothered to look at Ghost or Acronis, etc. since then. I’ve used it to create partition images and restore from them; create, re-size, slide and delete partitions. It’s been replaced by BootIt Bare Metal which I haven’t got around to trying yet.
Microsoft desktop operating systems have been incredibly reliable since Windows 2000 was released, so long as they are installed on working hardware, are malware free and are using OS compatible drivers (e.g. cannot use XP drivers on Vista). For instance, all major legitimate Vista issues were resolved with SP1, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618(v=ws.10).aspx
Most negative stuff written online about Microsoft products are largely myths and urban legends. People frequently blame the OS for problems caused by defective hardware, malware infections and poorly written third party applications. Then you get everybody’s meaningless personal experiences not understanding what is at fault or why so they blame the OS. Like any piece of software there have been legitimate issues with Microsoft operating systems but these are all documented and fixable.
Anybody who tells you that they do or you should have to re-install the operating system for any other reason (with a few specific exceptions) then defective hardware or malware infection has no idea what they are talking about.
Windows operating systems do not get “dirty” outside of a malware infection. They get loaded down with junk software that was carelessly installed. Registry bloat for instance has absolutely no bearing on system performance. Windows includes all the utilities you need to remove such software or to stop it from loading at system startup and like “magic” original performance is restored.
Poptech said May 9, 2013 at 6:52 pm:
That’s borderline outright baldfaced lying, possibly only true at the beginning. I well remember when M$ released the bloated Vista beast, decreeing that much current iron would have to be scrapped as incompatible as M$ insisted on transforming the PC into an anti-personal “anti-piracy” corporate spying machine. The hue and cry was loud, with makers complaining bitterly of changing hardware to conform to Vista.
That’s the real truth about the M$ monopoly, new version comes out, hardware makers must conform to M$. Not the BS you’re shelling out.
And even at the beginning, to get the market share, did M$ make their OS work with every PC sold? Hell no. No one who has had to search for days to find a working device driver would ever buy that crap. Before XP, before even ME, even when 95 was a revolutionary product, it didn’t work with every machine. There were hardware and software incompatibilities up the wazoo. I ran Norton Utilities because it would catch the many machine freezing or BSOD crashing incidents and keep the system running.
I was there. I remember those times well. If you’re going to shovel that stuff and say how great M$ was and is, you better stop at this site first.
—
Poptech said on May 9, 2013 at 9:14 pm:
You boldly toss out a link to a Russian site? You must really trust your virus protection! Either that or you’re drumming up business for those who fix hosed systems…
Reading from the top of the document, the whining is largely of an old familiar variety:
Hardware makers don’t release specs, keep everything proprietary, those who would write free device drivers don’t have the info needed, so hardware doesn’t get supported.
That’s about 70% of the complaining right there. And that’s how the M$ beast works. M$ releases the info about their OS with non-disclosure agreements to the hardware makers. They in turn make their stuff to work with the M$ product, using proprietary closed-source drivers. Hardware makers are “rewarded” by having their stuff work with the OS that’s forced onto virtually all PC buyers.
There’s little incentive to release info to make free Linux drivers. Some companies do release Linux-version proprietary drivers, for those who want to use them.
Other whining is how hard it is to make closed-source software using open-source Linux. Duh! That’s usually right in the licenses for open source, you’ll release the code of software you derive from it (make your work open source as well).
Plus, some of what this document says is just plain WRONG. For example, Hardware section:
Quick Google later, from Sept 18, 2012: Intel Clover Trail Will Support Linux After All
Your “2013” anti-Linux doc doesn’t even have the facts right for the end of 2012!
Poptech says: (May 9, 9:14 pm)
“Legitimate technical reasons why Linux on the desktop is not ready for prime time and may never be,
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#TLDR ”
But, further up that same page …
“I want to make one thing crystal clear – Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it’s definitely not ready for the desktop either.”
It’s worse than we thought, we’re all doomed, etc., etc…
@andic
As a fellow mainframer from the last millenium, I feel your pain 🙂
If you trace the steps to Windows and the movement of people from company to company, you kind-of understand why everything is not perfect. (Mind you, I really like Win 7 and Win Server 2008R2). Burroughs MCP (disclaimer: I worked for them) was ahead of its time and never fell over. When digital’s VMS (disclaimer: I worked for them too) was created an an “homage”, it still seemed to be OK. Then Microsoft hired a bunch of guys from digital and created NT and I heard stories that Bill Gates made some detail design decisions. Windows 8 is NT 6.2.
Richard, the underpinnings for Win8, all the way from NT, are fine. Very solid, well designed, well engineered. Incremental UI changes over the years have been ok, and reasonable, even logical. Kinda sucks how they completely turned the UI upside down this iteration, though… and want me to use my computer in a way that is completely foreign to me. As I said in a previous thread, I have two 26″ and a 32″ monitor… no way I’d possibly want to start waving my arm around all this screen real estate to “touch” everything!
It’s nice to see former mainframe people who aren’t stuck in the EBCDIC fantasy land a few people I know still inhabit. It’s sad. Funny that my desktop has so much more power than the $2m VAX 11/780 I used to be a tape jockey for!
I have changed from an old Acronis (works fine from CD, but had problems with a new harddisk) to the Win7/Win8 system backup with CD.
I notice that nobody comments on using these. The main reason is probably that Win7/8 is very stable.
But I would like to hear from somebody who actually needed to use it.
“Revo Uninstaller” is a great little programme. It snares every trace of whatever it is you want uninstalled. No nasty little bits left to lurk and do vile things.
Recommended by Greg, the family computer genius.
As others have mentioned VMware is your friend, I’m shortly going to purchase this so I can set up a machine with the O/S, hardware and utility SW such as ZA and VMware Workstation, take a disc image (I think I have a version of Acronis that runs off a boot disk and so isn’t installed, then I will create various VMware images, one for Oracle, one for my personal stuff, one for my work environment (I telecommute).
This way I can restore the basic machine from a terminal BSOD or HW failure using a disk image, takes no time at all, then copy the VMware images back, something like that anyway. Quick and easy in comparison.
Unfortunately this is the natural path of evolution for software. It starts out good, gets successful, then become a complicated mess which feels more like malware than software. Hmmm, come to think of it, that pretty much describes anything written by Yahoo! !
Aka The Rest of Us. The higher user satisfaction ratings for the Mac vs. the PC speak for themselves. They indicate, among other things, that breakage on Macs occurs less often than on PCs contra the implication of Bertram Felden at May 9, 2013 at 11:13 pm
Now who doesn’t know much about computers? Those haven’t been around for ages. The mice from Apple are provided with an undivided shell over the front that looks like a single button, but there are two actual buttons underneath. The shell was a face-saver for Jobs, to conceal his climb-down on the matter.
You should have taken the opportunity to upgrade to windows 8. Win8 lets you reinstall the OS in place without having to reinstall all the programs. Very cool.
I know you don’t want those ‘use a Mac/Linux/whatever’ replies – but have you considered virtualizing? The free version of VMware would allow you to easily restore a given state of the Windows OS on the virtual machine, so you’d never have to do the complete re-installation again. There’s very little (if any) penalty in performance, too. I fiddled with all this for the first time a couple of months ago and was very impressed with how easy it is to get up and running.
For those that suspect a OS problem, MS always has provided a non-destructive method to replace the OS. See article at this link https://windowssecrets.com/top-story/win7s-no-reformat-nondestructive-reinstall/. This has saved my bacon in these situations. It’s either an hour with this method or a day reinstalling everything.
Hi Anthony,
maybe I duplicate some comments – can’t read all of them right now. Just some practical personal experience.
You talk about “disk image backup”. Do you backup a whole disk, or selected partitions? This matters. It triggers my comment.
My point being, irrespective of what operating system you use, the way you organize your computer, if done “smart” may help you a lot in recovery. I am not a computer expert, but I have done my juggling with the beasts so as to be the master and not the slave. These are my general rules.
Always create partitions and dedicate them according to their use. To start off always store your data in seperate partitions and never on the same partition your operating systems is. Secondly, as much as possible, also put your programs in a seperate partition. I know Windows stores a lot of the stuff on the C-patition anyway, and some programs just have to be on C, but the goal here is to keep the system-partion as small as possible. It makes backing-up a lot easier. The problem nearly always is with the system-partition, so you have to just concentrate on that one.
The advantage of working with partitions also is it helps you a lot with making an image in your own way. You don’t need a commercial program like “Acronis”. You just do it yourself with free tools. And the easiest way is to just copy a partition say to a usb-device.
The easiest tool I know of is Minitool Partitionwizard. The best way is to boot from a live cd. This tool can also recover data and restore partitions, repair the mbr, edit the boot.ini and explore the content of partitions (fat and ntfs). But there are other free tools of course.
Whatever you do, good luck and patience!
Acronis sounds like an analogy of governments. Bloat to the point of blowing up.
I’ll also put my vote in for Revo Uninstaller and Easeus Todo Backup. Revo finds all sorts of stuff that built-in programmes leave behind. The only time I’ve got caught is when a softwares built-in programme (which Revo runs when you ask it to do the job for you), wanted me to re-boot the PC to complete the process. DO NOT do this, but let Revo continue until it has finished.
As for Easeus Todo – I take regular images with it, and keep them on separate HDD’s, and also used it to make a bootable disc. I had occasion to see how it worked, after removing some software that came with a Microsoft own brand keyboard & mouse! This messed up the standard mouse controls, but after removal I found myself in a boot loop situation. My old laptop’s CD/DVD drive is faulty, so with some trepidation I plugged the backup HDD into one USB port and an external (powered) CD/DVD drive with the bootable disc into another. To my great relief both were found, and I was able to restore from an image and get the PC working again. I had to do a few “tweaks” to some of the basic settings and preferences, but this took a fraction of the time that doing a full install would have taken.
_Jim says:
May 9, 2013 at 8:30 pm
Jim, I’m afraid people like you are the Typhoid Maries of the internet. If those computers you mention are connected to the internet, then I’ll bet anything you like that they are part of some botnet by now. They are almost certainly a vector actively spreading malware and spam. It will not going to show up on most virus/malware scans, because the purpose of the malware isn’t to do anything malicious to your data.
‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is all very well, but it is ‘broke’, and that’s why Microsoft has had to release free patches to ‘fix it’.
I say with not a hint of gloating, you, and everyone else would generally be better off running their preferred flavor of linux because of just the sort of issues brought up in the top post.
I don’t suggest it to people so I can feel snooty or “elite” or whatever, I’ve just never been as satisfied and productive with my, or anyone else’s, computer since I moved out into the wilderness of open source software.
If you’re honestly happy with your OS and software choices being made for you by someone else, awesome, I’m naturally skeptical, but hey, rock on!
Last time I broke something and needed a full reinstall, it was my fault for experimenting with shoehorning a kubuntu 13.04 upgrade into a lubuntu 12.10 install without checking to make sure I wasn’t going to break anything, or better yet, seeing if there was an already established and easy enough method posted online somewhere.
Happily I moved to separate / and /home partitions a couple ‘buntu generations ago, so I just grabbed my handy dandy usb stick and loaded a fresh kubtunu on it, took 15 minutes from downloading the .iso/unetbootin’ing it onto the usb until I loaded up my familliar home environment from my botched experiment.
It’s nice out here, honest, but again, good luck with the rebuild… I haven’t checked in a while, but you can set up a separate home partition on your disks with windows too can’t you?
Being able to maintain the same exact files/folders/settings while hopping distros is awesome, would be nice for cases like the Acronis-extraction snafu I think.