XP will not boot after TrueImage uninstall

Hello all
I dual boot XP Pro SP3 and PLinuxOS using GRUB.
I have had TrueImage 10 and Disk Director Suite 10installed on my XP partition,
and have just bought TrueImage2009.
I installed TrueImage 10 and Disk Director Suite using Ashampoo Uninstaller 3 to track the installation of them both together. I uninstalled TrueImage 10 by stopping the TrueImage services, then Control Panel - Add or Remove Programs - Remove TrueImage 10. After this I ran Uninstaller 3 to uninstall, which uninstalled any traces of TrueImage and Disk Director.
After this, I rebooted, with the following results:
Reboot, the GRUB screen shows my boot options, Windows, PCLinuxOS. Select Windows from GRUB. Screen says that the last boot of Windows failed and asked whether to boot in Safe Mode, Last known good configuration, Boot normally, etc. Whatever is selected, however, the pc does a complete reboot, as if I had pressed the hot reboot button.
I can boot into PCLinuxOS, but there is no way I can boot WIndows.
Is it likely that installation of TI modifies the Windows boot manager, so that when it is uninstalled then the boot manager no longer works correctly ? Could I sort out the problem by possible boot from XP cd, fixmbr then boot from live PCLos cd and rebuild GRUB ?
Can anyone advise me as to my next step ?

 

No, your MBR is working fine since GRUB starts up correctly. fixboot also will not do you any good since you are able to boot to the Windows partition, and the boot process starts (but fails with an error message). Your problem is probably related to this:

Uninstaller 3 probably removed the Acronis SnapAPI driver and Snapshot manager files from Windows. The Acronis uninstaller leaves these files in place. If you remove them and try to reboot there is a registry entry that tries to load the files. If they are missing then the boot fails. See the following Acronis KB article for more info about this.

There are a couple of ways out of this:
1. If PCLinuxOS allows you to read and write to the Windows NTFS partition, grab a copy of the two files that you need (SnapAPI.dll and Snapman.sys) from another PC with TI 10 installed, or extract them from one of your backup images. Copy them to the \Windows\System32 folder and then try rebooting.
2. If you still have an image from before, restore the Windows partition from an Acronis boot CD. Repeat the uninstall but make sure that either the registry entry is removed per the instructions in the KB article or that the snapshot manager files are left in place.

 

Thanks for the reply.
I have investigated the backup image which I have, but snapapi.dll and snapman.sys are not there.
I have managed to find a snapapi.dll on the internet, but am having problems finding snapman.sys. Have you any idea where I can get this file ?
I do not want to restore the xp partition unless it is absolutely unavoidable, since it is a backup of the basic XP installation with none of the applications that I use in it. It is purely for 'dire emergencies' only.

 

If the image was created before installing TI then those files would be missing. If done after installing they should be there in c:\Windows\System32\.

I would be wary of using a snapapi.dll file found on the internet. Here are a couple of other suggestions for obtaining the files:

1. Contact Acronis via Live Chat on their web site and ask for copies of the files.
2. If a second (test) PC is available, use the boot CD to create an image of its Windows partition. Install TI 10 on the PC. Copy the two needed files from C:\Windows\System32\. Restore your saved image to return the PC to the state it was in before installing TI.

Hopefully you are using the latest build 4942 for TI 10 and you have done restores on the test PC so that you are confident in its ability to support the PC's hardware from the boot CD.

 

If you can boot into Windows Safe mode, you could then re-install TI.

 

Thanks for the replies.
I installed TrueImage 10 into a temporary VirtualBox virtual XP installation on my PCLinuxOS partition. I then took the 2 files from this installation, windows/system32/snapapi.dll and windows/system32/drivers/snapman.sys and copied them to their respective locations on the non-booting XP installation.
Unfortunately this made no difference at all, XP will still not boot, whether I choose Normal boot, Safe mode, Last known good configuration etc. There is no error message, just a reboot of the pc.

 

I would still suggest re-installing TI it ought to sort out the registry entries.

The other alternative is to make a repair install of XP, which will wipe out all your MS updates and service packs apart form the one the OS CD came with.

Via your Virtual Box does the XP partition look in tact?

Although theoretically possible, I'd think hunting down the registry files in the image and trying to put them back would be a nightmare.

Just had a thought - did you by any chance activate OS Selector that comes with DD10?

 

Can you mount the Local_Machine hive of the XP registry from your Virtual XP installation? If so, you can attempt editing of the registry of the non-booting XP per the Acronis KB article. If you can't do it this way do you have a copy of BartPE? Booting from BartPE (or VistaPE) will allow access to the non-booting XP registry for editing.

If you boot your machine from an XP CD, is it able to "see" the installation of XP from the repair console? It probably wouldn't hurt to re-write the boot sector of the XP partition using fixboot, although I doubt this is the cause.

 

Thanks again for the replies.
bodgy - As I said, I am unable to boot into XP, even in safe mode, so I cannot reinstall TI.

k0lo - I am not sure what you are driving at. VirtualBox is being run within my PCLinuxOS installation with XP in a virtual machine. This is a completely separate entity from anything else on my pc, and is basically just a file which is only treated as an installation under VirtualBox. I can do what I want as regards installing or removing software, mounting registry hive or editing the registry within this virtual pc, but this will have no effect whatsoever on my non-booting XP installation or on anything else on my pc. If, then, I mount the Local_Machine hive of the XP registry from my Virtual XP installation then this will apply only to the virtual machine and will have no bearing at all on my non-bootable XP installation.

 

I wasn't suggesting mounting the Virtual XP hive, but rather the hive from the Windows partition. To do this, Virtual Box must allow access to the physical hard disk. Does it? (I'm not familiar with Virtual Box). I use Virtual XP on Windows 7, and it does allow access to the physical hard disk from within the VM.

 

Thanks for clearing that up.
I set up my non-booting XP partition as a shared folder within my XP virtual system. I then carried out the instructions in https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1191656&postcount=71 as far as step 10. When I pressed the OK button as stated in step 10 I received a dialog stating : Cannot load Windows/system32/config/software. The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
I think that this probably means that it is still working on the virtual xp, not the non-bootable xp that I pointed it to.

 

Probably Virtual Box uses some kind of file share mechanism to access the physical disk, and the "in use" error is produced by Virtual XP. But I have another idea. The hive that you are trying to mount is simply a file. Can you copy the file C:\Windows\System32\Config\system from the physical XP partition to your VM? If so, try to mount the copy of the hive from there. If it works, after editing the hive, copy the edited file back to the physical XP partition.

 

Thanks for the reply.
I did as you suggested, but unfortunately I still cannot boot XP.
Looks as if I will have to either overwrite with the backup or reinstall XP from scratch.
Trouble with the backup is that there are drivers for a graphics card that I have replaced, so will have to sort that out. Probably no big deal though. Shame about having to reinstall the apps, though, always assuming that I can find them again.
I wouldn't have thought that uninstalling a program could give so much trouble.

 

There must be some other registry entry that is messed up. I've not heard of an uninstall of TI doing this before, but it could be. Or, it could be that Uninstaller 3 removed something that it shouldn't have.

You have one more alternative - you could try a repair install of XP. It will roll your installation back to the state on the CD (RTM, SP1 or SP2), so afterwards you will need to run Windows Update to come back up to current status. However, it won't affect your installed programs, so you can avoid some reinstalling.

*Edit* Before doing anything, make another image of the XP partition in its current non-booting state. Perhaps it can still be salvaged.

 

Thanks, that it what I will do first. I'll let you know how I get on.

 

I'd still like to know if the OS selector in DD10 was activated, because if so, this would result in this sor t of problem if DD10 was removed without the OS Selector being de-activated.

Another suggestion to add to K0lo's is, hunt down or make (not sure if Linux will allow this) a VistaPE boot disk as K0lo said this would boot into a Vista environment and allow you proper access to all XP files, though the security marker might need to be reset for some system and registry entries.

 

Colin:

If OS selector would have been activated and its files removed then it would have produced an error message on-screen when booting. However, it wasn't because crow_se had GRUB installed to the MBR instead of OS Selector. His GRUB menu was working fine. From post #1:

 

I sit corrected

 

Re: XP will not boot after TrueImage uninstall (solved)

Well, I did a repair install of XP
It all went well until I was greeted with a dialog asking for file viaagp1.sys. I didn't have this file on the partition, and I have misplaced the cd with the mobo drivers. I eventually tracked the file down and fed it to the installation. Apart for asking me to confirm a couple of drivers and asking for the installation disk fo an app, everything then went ok. I now have bootable XP and PCLinuxOS through GRUB.
Thanks again for all of the help and advice.

 

I'm glad that you got things working again. I really wish that we knew what went wrong. There is a nagging voice in the back of my head that thinks it would be a good idea to run chkdsk on the XP partition to see if there is any kind of file system error, or Memtest86+ to rule out RAM problems. Otherwise, enjoy!