Can't get rid of Acronis' phantom Optical Drive “E”

I just finished removing (via acronis’ own uninstall) TI 10.0.4940 trial. Problem is that TI did not return my system the way it found it. I now have a “phantom” optical drive “E” that was not there before. Before TI I had HD drive C, Optical drive D and card reader drives E and F. Now I have HD drive C, Optical drive D, Optical drive E and card reader drives F and G. I did a search of both the HD and Registry of any remaining Acronis Crumbs left behind after the Uninstall. There were literally tons of “Acronis” and “True Image” things littering both the HD and Registry. I deleted all of their left behind junk but that didn’t help get rid of the phantom drive they left behind.

All I want to do is get my drive letters back the way they were before this thing was installed and removed from my computer. How do I get rid of this phantom Optical Drive “E”?

Regards,
Stan

 

If you have Windows Restore turned on, restore to a day before you installed Acronis.

 

Thanks for the swift reply Ralphie.... That would not be a good option in light of the fact that since installing this thing, 5 days worth of Business emails and a lot of NewsGroup forum correspondences have collected on the computer since then. Those would be lost with a restore.

However, if it turns out that this will be the only way to get rid of this thing left behind by Acronis, then arrangements for transferring all of these correspondences plus a bunch of other business related files will have to be made before the restore.

Regards,
Stan

 

This is weird ... I haven't seen anyone else report a phantom optical drive after uninstalling Ver 10. Have you searched the Registry for a drive E? Do you run any Registry cleaners regularly?

 

First, I made a mistake in telling which drive was the new Acronis Created Drive left on my system after uninstalling the thing. Here is what I actually have (according to the drive listings under “My Computer”):

Before Acronis:
Local Disk (C: ), 3½ Floppy (A: ), DVD-RW Drive (D: ), Removable Disk (E: ) & Removable Disk (F: )

After Acronis (Uninstalled)
Local Disk (C: ), 3½ Floppy (A: ), DVD-RW Drive (D: ), Removable Disk (E: ), Removable Disk (F: ) & CD Drive (G: )

CD Drive (G: ) being the Phantom drive left over among tons of other Acronis stuff after uninstalling the thing. BTW, there are still a lot of things left in the registry associated with “Acronis” that will NOT delete even though the thing has been uninstalled. But none of the registry entries seem to be associated with this phantom CD Drive (G: ) Acronis left on my system.

To your question.... Yes I run registry cleaners regularly and have to resort to manual cleaning now and then when up against programs with sloppy coding that leave crumbs behind them when they are removed. But this is the first one of those that left me with more drives than I started with. I'm in no way a super knowledgeable systems fixer but can usually fix things screwed up by sloppy programs but this one has me totally in the dark.

Regards,
Stan

 

Re: Can't get rid of Acronis' phantom Optical Drive “E”

Maybe go into Disk Management and try deleting it, if it shows up in there. That or try uninstalling it under Device Manager.

 

Sorry about the funny faces.... I didn't put those in there.

Regards,
Stan

 

It doesn't show up under Device Manager (Storage Devices, DVD/CD-ROM Drives or Disk Drives).

Don't know where "Disk Manager" is....

Thanks for the reply....
Stan

 

Re: Can't get rid of Acronis' phantom Optical Drive “E”

If you are running XP, go to: Control Panel->Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management. You need to be under an Administrative account to access this.

 

Okay, now that I got there, I remember being there before some time in the past. Anyway..... The Acronis Phantom Drive does not show there either.

The only place that drive is showing up (that I have seen so far) is under "My Computer/Devices with Removable Storage"

Thanks Again for the Reply,
STan

 

Re: Can't get rid of Acronis' phantom Optical Drive “E”

Okay, the only options I can think of now:

Try going back to Device Manager and select: View->Show Hidden Devices. See if that reveals the phantom drive.

...or

Have you rebooted your pc since seeing this error? If not, try that. Maybe it will clear.

Sorry, that is about all I can come up with, at least regarding simple approaches. There are some others such as a "Repair Install", but that is a bit drastic at this point, especially if that phantom drive is not causing any problems for you other than being an annoying visual distraction.

 

No Joy.... Nothing popped up that wasn't already shown.

Plenty of times... Each time I would find more crumbs left behind from the Acronis Uninstall process, I would reboot after removing the offending crumbs.

Well, all it is, is an annoying distraction along with all the left over crumbs this thing left cluttering up the HD and registry after uninstalling on top of reminding me just how sloppy some programmers can be. This one is the worst I have ever seen as far as sloppy programming. I don't even think Norton is that bad and Norton leaves a lot of trash behind after trying to get rid of it. However, if you can find all the Norton stuff left over, you can at least delete it. Besides from Acronis' Phantom Optical Drive, there is still a lot of Acronis junk left cluttering up the Registry that will not allow me to delete it.

Thanks for trying to help....
Stan

 

Remove all USB devices (except your mouse) and reboot - see if that makes any difference.

F.

 

This is weird ... more stuff should not be re-appearing. Have you looked at Start/Run then type msconfig, then click the Startup tab. Check if anything related to Acronis or True Image is there.

 

I undoubtedly didn’t make that clear as to what was happening. I meant that with each reboot, further searches on the HD and Registry would show more things associated with this Acronis thing that I had missed before. Probably because I would search one time on Acronis, then next time on True Image and then search on TrueImage (one word) and so forth. This intrusive thing had stuff left hiding all over the place after its uninstall.

Anyway, I finally had to do a restore back to just before I installed this thing after taking all the time it took to make sure that all our business work since installing the offending program was backed up in order to keep us current after the restore. The Restore got rid of all the Acronis Crap left in the Registry that we had not been allowed to delete but guess what? We got the following warning right before clicking on the Go-A-Head for the Restore:

“Changes made to drive(s) G: after this point cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded from system restore monitoring or was turned off or removed.” Remember, Drive G: is the Phantom Optical Drive created and left on our system by Acronis.

So, it would appear that Acronis’ phantom drive is here to stay or until a complete reinstall of the OS is done.

Then I remembered that I had a Ghost 2003 image taken three weeks ago. Maybe this would work. Again, I made sure that all business related data was saved to current time and did the Ghost restore. Walah! System back to the way it was 3 weeks ago without the offending Acronis Phantom Optical drive. Of course it took all day yesterday and today to bring the system up to current level since the three week image was made.

What a frigging mess and waste of time this Acronis thing caused. I was under the misconception that Acronis would work like Ghost 2003 and not take over the whole system and start building phantom drives and putting tons of directories and files all over the system of which a good number could not be removed even after an uninstall of the offending software. Was I wrong and did I pay big for it.

The reason I was checking Acronis out is because I use Ghost 2003 which I am told Windows Vista is not compatible with. If we go with Vista at some point, we will need to upgrade our backup imaging program. I have been told that all versions of Ghost after 2003 have grown more intrusive and bloated so I decided to give Acronis a Test Drive. Since that turned out to be a total nightmare, I think the best thing to do is stay with XP and Ghost 2003 because that combination works.

Thanks to everyone for trying to help us through this mess.

With best regards to all (except the incompetents at Acronis)
Stan

 

Glad to hear you sorted it out even though it was a long process. Still I've yet to read of a similar thing happening to another user. But your experience of trying to uninstall the software is one reason why I don't have TI installed and use only the Rescue cd. Of course I don't do scheduled backups of any kind. And I stayed with ver. 9. And after seeing all the messages here from the unwitting beta testers, I'll probably never upgrade to v.10.
As a tip for future reference, if you are trying new software which you might not want to keep and want to be sure your registry is the same after you uninstall the software, there's a free utility that will ensure you get back your registry to its previous state. Consult your Google Gods for EruNT.

 

Read this article : 241257
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;241257&x=16&y=10

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.
2. At the command prompt, type the following lines, pressing ENTER after each line
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
cd\%SystemRoot%\System32
start devmgmt.msc
where %SystemRoot% is the folder in which Windows 2000 is installed.

3. Troubleshoot the devices and drivers in Device Manager, as required.

NOTE: You must first select show hidden devices on the Device Manager View menu before you can see devices that are no longer present in the system.
4. When you are done troubleshooting, quit Device Manager, and then close the Command Prompt window. Closing the window clears the variable you set in step 2 and prevents ghosted devices from being displayed when you use the Show hidden devices command.

With this four steps you can see "all" phantom or nonpresent devices

Next Steep:

-Execute c:\sysprep\sysprep -clean (you need extract sysprep folder from deploy.cab on winxp sp2 CD)

Article : 302577
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;302577&x=12&y=9

With this steep sysprep utility will clean all nonpresent devices

Try this steeps,
Is very easy
I think this can solve the problem...

Excuse me my english level jijiji