Wow, made the most expensive mistake ever. Read about this program in PC mag as a must have, so thought, why not? Installed it. I like to put my computer to sleep in a low power format. Guess what, Comodo will not let it happen. After a few weeks of this came the biggest mistake.
Tired of not being able to power down, I uninstalled it. It said next boot up it would finish uninstall. On the boot up, it started the final uninstall. Little did I know, it was the final uninstall of my hard drive. LOST virtually everything. Now I am pretty good with the computer stuff but my friend is literally one of the best computer minds in the country. He used every tool in his arsenal to try to save my drive. The time machine drove it back to the stone ages. It is worthless. Every file was corrupted. After this happened, took out my laptop to find answers. Look at some of the blogs. It has happened to a whole lot of people. This program should not be out there with issues like this. I am now trying to rebuild my machine, new hard drive, new OS install, recovering backups.
People, read the blogs on this Time Machine. If you want to be sent back to the stone ages and spend a whole lot of time and money, download it. Just giving people a warning.
New hard drive? ??? Do you mean that CTM did destroy your hard drive? There are known issues (quite a lot) of CTM destroying the MBR of the hard drive, but then the hard drive can still be used. Though i must admit that i also do not understand why comodo still has this program in on there download page. They know about these serious problems, but still they keep it there. This will eventually cost there good reputation (maybe it already has).
But back to business, can you tell what exactly did you try in order to repair/recover your hard drive?
Sorry you lost everything! It’s strange how this works for some and not others. On two different laptops, one x86 the other x64 and both Win 7, I can uninstall/re-install with ease. The x86 lappy is a one drive two partition with XP on the second partition. No problems here.
After I tried to uninstall it, it said to finish it needs to reboot. After reboot it said it was uninstalling. It then stopped processing. Let it go for about 15 minutes but you could see the hard drive working about something. I rebooted and no boot record. The drive was a 1T hitachi. Tried to rebuild the boot from the OS disk, nothing. Took it to my friend that had a deep scan program from Geek Squad. It ran for about 2 hours. It stopped after about 20% scan, then hung up. He ran a few more tests. The whole drive was basically toast. It couldn’t repair or reconstruct 90% of the files. Had to do put another drive with new install. This has been a two day job repairing it. Sucks. I did mount the drive as a secondary and as soon as I am able to get off anything I can that I didn’t back up will try to test it and reformat it.
Let me repeat with no malice toward the company Comodo but if they know about a MAJOR problem, they need to pull it. Sorry I ever read the article in PC Magazine praising this software. Call me a dumbass…
faiaja, software cannot destroy a drive like that. It was probably a bad drive to begin with and this just sped up the notice of the bad drive. You can run SMART tools to analyse the SMART stats built into the drive. You could have RMA’ed the drive. Sometimes drives are just faulty. The uninstall of CTM most likely failed do to the failing of the drive, do if the drive was good, then the uninstall would have succeeded. You blame CTM because it was the last thing you did before the drive failed. If you would have, say, uninstalled MS office and the drive failed, then you would have blamed that. Hardware failure for mechanical drives is more common than people think. Sorry you had a bad experience.
Star Shadow,
You are wrong.
It is widely known that uninstalling CTM can corrupt your MBR. Once this happens, your only solution is to reformat and reinstall your OS. This forum is full of stories like this. This happened to me on 2 of my computers.
Some say that there are 3rd. party utilities that may work in repairing the MBR. I have seen no proof of this. Just speculation.
This is bad software that absolutely can destroy your HDD. No question. Period.
I also was confused by fajaja’s 1st post about his hard drive being destroyed, but in his later post he explained that it was not accessible anymore and that he want to put it in a pc as secondary drive to see if he can still save some of the data before reformatting that drive. In other words his drive looks to be ok, only did the sector structure got badly damaged to make it unusable. This is a known serious issue about CTM. In other words CTM does the opposite of what it is supposed to do. It is supposed to protect your data, but in some cases it does destroy it. I guess i’m one of the lucky people that did not get much problems with CTM, but i sure will not uninstall it, cos i’m not waiting for it to damage my hard drives MBR. For the record, i did remove all tasks from the scheduler and eve so did i remove all snapshots with exception of the baseline. In other words, CTM is still there on my pc, but i do not use it. It’s just too dangerous to be let lose in a world where not all users are computer specialists. Actually, a piece of software that damages hard drives is considered malware in today’s world. CTM can be add to that category as long as it is downloadable as an official stable release. By the way, i did send CTM’s main executable for inspection to the CIS group. I wonder what they thought about that action. ;D
Just to make it clear. I do like the idea of CTM, but it’s not ready yet to be called a stable release. It is not even ready to be released as a release candidate. I sure hope that they can make it stable. I sure will try it if they did, though they still have a long way to go
Be careful with only keeping the original baseline as a snapshot. I have seen others accidentally uninstalling this software setup like this, and it automatically reverts to the very old baseline when done. You will lose a bunch of information.
If you like this software look at Rollback RX or EAZ-FIX. They own the engine CTM uses but their’s works 100% (I use them).
What program was successfully proven to repair a CTM corrupted MBR?
That’s just talk. It has been mentioned before in theory but no one has done it because it can’t be done.
Whereas members mentioned the HD was unbootable there were also those who confirmed that using Testdisk they were able to solve the MBR corruption issue (even at advice from others)
Of course there could be other tools able to fix the MRB…
Repairing the MBR is not really the issue. Even microsofts bootrec.exe can fix it, but fixing the mbr still does not make your pc bootable. If the file system got corrupted, then it still won’t boot. And if it is too badly corrupted, then it’s very hard for any tool to repair the sector chain for each file. As far as i know did indeed some people manage to repair there MBR, but still was the drive useless due to a corrupted file system.
Though a repaired MBR makes the drive accessible again as a secondary drive. This might help in recovering some of the lost data, though no guarantee there cos a broken sector chain can result in useless files (fragmented data, missing data or endless data. That last one in case the sector chain is referring to a sector that was already in the chain).
For 2 days back i posted a new thread asking others that successfully managed to recover/repair there hard drive to post there actions there. (see https://forums.comodo.com/news-announcements-feedback-ctm/post-here-if-you-were-able-to-recover-your-hard-drive-after-failed-ctm-uninstall-t55844.0.html) Till now no one did add a post. Maybe that can be seen as an indication on the number of successful repairs. Sounds like ZIP to me.
Don’t worry masterblaster. I did move all important data to an USB HDD. The CTM holding drive does now only contain OS and other installed programs. I did also move the installers of those programs to that same USB HDD.
I did try EAZ-FIX once, but it refused to install for some reason. I never did put more energy into it, because when i looked for a cause/solution, then i found one of your early posts on how great CTM was and that is was for free while it used Rollback’s and EAZ-FIX’s engine. Hehe… also you did love CTM once
Anyway, tanks for your concerns about system dropping back to baseline after an uninstall. Look at the bright side if that happens, the drive will still be bootable ;D
Though failure might indicate an issue, type (or reason) of failure might not always be the same whereas frequently used terms like “toasted” ,“destroyed” or “broken” do not convey much information:
It might be still a sensible advice to repair using Testdisk and provide info about the hardware and OS setup (eg multi boot), software version and the result of fix.
Of course whereas the corruption is beyond repair the fix won’t obviously help nor any fix might help if the HD is faulty or the data was heavily corrupted accessing (R/W) a CTM/EAZ-FIX/Rollback protected partition using another OS (without CTM/EAZ-FIX/Rollback) or liveCD (without CTM/EAZ-FIX/Rollback) or using unsupported setups (eg RAID arrays)
It might sound ZIP to you (perhaps no fix actually helped in your case) but it would matter not if those who succeeded did not post again in that two day old topic yours nor if such topic lingered neglected for longer time whereas advice about using Testdisk have been stickied in CTM help board.
Though in some cases it looks like the files were the ones available prior to installation (probably baseline reset was not carried during uninstall), using Testdisk was reported/confirmed to be able to restore access to the drive along with existing data and fuctional OS (it should be possible to find them using search or read some of those quotes).
Though in some cases it looks like the files were the ones available prior to installation (probably baseline reset was not carried during uninstall), using Testdisk was reported/confirmed to be able to restore access to the drive along with existing data (it should be possible to find them using search or read some of those quotes).
As i said, restoring the MBR is not the issue, but repairing the sector chain is. All files on a drive are a chain of sectors belonging to each other. If you brake one link in that chain, then the file is broken and your data might be lost. On NTFS drives a backup table is present and can be used to repair the chain, but if the backup table is also corrupted, then the data is lost. Testdisk can repair the MBR and partition table. As far as i know can it also repair files if the chain is broken. It uses the backup table to do so. CTM performs very low level disk access and that’s a risky business, cos 1 mistake in the software might cause data loss.
About the sticky thread, it’s rather useless. It doesn’t tell nowhere what to do with test disk. You forget that not everybody is a computer wizard.
I thought that people were saying their drive is now useless, and it is best to chuck it out the window into their neighbor’s backyard, or something. But I’m 99% sure it could be workable if you re-create the MBR and reformat, right?
And everyone (right?) backs up their data externally, so the only problem is the reformat process, which I find is good to do anyway.
I have no clue if that member was a “computer wizard” but he sure he tried to help by sharing those info.
Guess I have not to remind you can improve over such topic with more detailed explanation about testdisk even to the point it would be possible for each member with similar issue to actually confirm the cases where corruption extend outside the MBR and partition table (by simply delaying related repair step you mentioned)
I hope you will not forget you can actually lend your help in that regard after writing such harsh comment.
There was at least one member that did not use Testdisk (see quote) but MbrFix which is apparently limited to the partition table and MBR (AFAIK amounting to 512 bytes).
Whereas issue might not always be the same the solution mentioned by that member might not apply in this topic case nor the scenario you mentioned.
There are several post on this forum about members that did use MBR repair tools. There drive became “bootable” again which is at least a start in getting back the data, but the windows setup got somehow damaged. The disk was still not really usable due to several errors within windows and eventually they had to reformat and reinstall. This is why i suspect that CTM (or maybe just the installer/uninstaller) does harm the sector chains. The MBR is only used when booting up and a damaged partition table would result in lost partitions or wrong partition maps. So what is left over is file corruption. Both FAT(32) and NTFS do have a backup table. The NTFS backup table is more reliable than the FAT(32) backup table. Programs like checkdisk and also Testdisk do use those backup tables to repair damaged chains. In some posts on these forum there are messages about checkdisk messages. Checkdisk does come up at windows boot time if it detects a difference between the original and backup allocation table. If both tables are corrupted, then it’s very hard to recover any data, because those programs will not have any clue on how it should be. I suspect that CTM does manipulate those tables, because it somehow stores the snapshots hidden on the drives. It need to modify the tables for that or else windows might claim a sector which is already in use by a CTM snapshot. Though feel free to correct me if i’m completely wrong.
But to jump back to the topic of repair, unfortunately can also testdisk not repair the chains if both allocation tables are corrupted. Nor do i know of any other application that can.
About my post to ask people to post there recover actions, well i hoped to create a useful thread there with resources that could help others. So yes, i did want to help.
The problem with all the possible solutions is that they are snippered over several threads, meaning someone in need needs to look around in more than one thread to find a possible solution for his/her problem.
Some additional commend on testdisk, it’s a rather good program. No doubt about that, but the last testdisk version is released in april 2009 while windows 7 got released in october 2009. I know that windows 7 uses almost the same boot process as vista did, but it is almost the same. Not 100%. The bootrec application of ms is different between vista and 7. That tool is there to repair MBR and others boot problems like BCD corruption. I just wonder why bootrec is different between vista and 7. Is there maybe a difference in the MBR? If yes, then would teskdisk still be able to work 100% correctly on win 7? It’s just a thought…
You are right there, but the reformat will erase all the pictures of there girlfriends.
My experience is that mostly only people that are experienced pc users do backup there data. More than 50% does not. Those that do not do rely on ms system restore and tools like CTM. Nothing wrong with that (if they would work), but those tools still wont help if the HDD head makes an emergency landing on the HDD surface.
It would help if comodo did put it back to beta release
For example extended corruption might occur whereas a protected partition is written (or mounted with read/write settings) with an OS without CTM installed.
Rebooting during uninstallation might likely result in extended corruption as well and of course there might be other reason for failure (with differet levels of data corruption).
On this ground I still think it might be sensible advice to repair using Testdisk and provide info about the hardware and OS setup (eg multi boot), software version and the result of fix.
I had no clue that would have been difficult to acknowledge that much whereas I find difficult to assume each new issue to be the same even more when there is not much information (or rather circumstantial one).
Perhaps you might have found easier to just integrate the stikied topic you stated to be “useless” as the solution does not appear to be just speculation nor “sound like ZIP”.
