CTM creates a Non Boot machine

First the good news. I used Paragon system 2010 backup to create a backup on an external USB
Now the REALLY Bad News
No matter how many different approaches, When booting the XP Dell Laptop ALL I see is a black screen with the blinking cursor and a “.” (dot or [period) on the second line.

Am I being forced to reformat my 500GB drive, install windows then do a restore of the drive?

I have attempted to use the Paragon restore cd, But I might have ■■■■■■■ up the USB drive by attempting to fix.
Here is a “listing” of the two drives:
Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Bootable CD shows the following when booting and showing disks:

Basic Disk 0
N L Type FS Size Label1 Device Mount
0 Primary Unform 7.8GB /dev/sda1
1 C Primary FAT116 94.1 Mb DelUtility /dev/sda2 /mnt/disk/sda2
2 Primary Free 923.6 GB

Basic Disk 1
N L Type FS Size Label1 Device Mount
0 D Primary FAT16 94.1 Mb DellUtility /dev/sdb1 /mnt/disk/sdb1
1 E Primary NTFS 465.7 Gb LapC500 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/disk/sdb2

I am very concerned by Disk 0 showing the 923.6 GB as Free??? That is where my backups should be

Any ideas?
boblevy@storageman.com

I got the same exact same thing when uninstalling CTM. This was on a Vista 32 machine.
I had to reformat and reinstall Windows losing EVERYTHING in the process. It’s hard to believe but this is very common with this software. They need to take down the download.
I have this also on my laptop and I am afraid to uninstall it.

Same thing happened to me: Read about the dangers of time machine, uninstalled it, and my hard drive would not boot! At first I got a windows shutdown message after the drivers were loaded. Later I got nothing but a black screen and blinking cursor. Partition software and boot disks, such as the paragon recovery disk no longer saw my C: hard driver at all. Heaven was helping me, since I finally recovered my hard drive with testdisk. It found the disk misreporting the number of heads per sector, it was able to detect the drive, recover the NTFS partition, and write the coorect data to the disk partition table. Try testdisk, included with boot disks such as the ultimate boot disk. it may save you days of work.

An uninstall tip: CTM installs drivers that load in memory before the windows gui even starts. You need to let its uninstall program reboot your computer, and uninstall low level drivers before doing anything else. Third party uninstallers like revo uninstall try to detect settings and files left over by an uninstall programs, and delete them. This is trouble with CTM. Best to install CTM with an uninstaller like total uninstall that takes a snapshot of your entire C drive, including files like boot.ini – before and after CTM is installed.
You then have a record of exactly what CTM installed. Let CTM do its thing. After reboot, examine your log and see if CTM left anything behind.

So it is important to uninstall CTM via it’s own uninstaller only?

Presumably 3rd party uninstallers like Revo were never designed for applications starting before windows. If an uninstall asks for a reboot I always allow that rather than letting Revo remove the leftovers, as presumably the reboot is doing just that anyway.