Acronis TI won't start, uninstall or reinstall

I am running Acronis True Image Home 8 on Windows XP Pro.

I have added an extra hard drive to my system, replaced another (I now have 4 in total), and installed Seagate Diskwizard and Seagate Seatools. (Seagate Diskwizard is based on an Acronis product.) After I did this TI was very slow to open - it took about 25 minutes for the program to open fully and become usable, although once it was open it appeared to operate correctly.

I tried reinstalling TI but received an error message stating that the data file was corrupt (this is an approximation; I cannot confirm the exact wording as I no longer receive that error message, as noted below). I received the same message if I tried to uninstall the program.

I tried a System Restore to the point prior to installing the Seagate tools, but still could not uninstall or reinstall the product.

Somewhere along the line of attempting to uninstall and reinstall the program, and running various System Restore operations, the program stopped opening at all. Now, when I attempt to open it, the program shows the error message "Acronis True Image Home can not find the proper serial number. You should reinstall the product." Unfortunately I cannot do this as I still cannot uninstall or reinstall the program.

I have also downloaded a trial version of the latest TI program, but won't install either. It produces the error message "The older version of the product cannot be removed because it seems to be corrupted".

Does anyone know haw I can remove the "corrupted" program so that I may reinstall? Is there perhaps an ini file which I can delete, or a registry entry that can be amended?

Thanks.

 

Do a search for posts by bodgy.
I think there are uninstall instructions (or at least a link to them) at the bottom.

 

Thanks for your reply.

I found the link on Bodgy's posts as you suggested, but experienced a major crash when I attempted to reboot. In fact I have only now got my PC running again following this incident.

I am not suggesting that Bodgy's linked guide was responsible. In fact I don't think that the problem was directly related to Acronis True Image at all; the problems with the program were a symptom, not the cause. I believe that my PC was infected by a virus. The disc's mbr was corrupted, chkdsk found corrupted files on the disc, and I eventually had to do a repair reinstall of Windows to get it to boot in Normal (i.e. not Safe) mode.

I guess that will teach me to use Acronis True Image's backup facility more often...

Again, thanks for the suggestion.