I did a CTM uninstall test on a fresh installed Win 7 64bit machine and got an unbootable machine afterwards. This is what happened:
Installed windows 7 64bit
Made a copy of the MBR
Installed CTM (2.6)
Again made a copy of the MBR
Did download some music and made 3 snapshots in-between
Uninstalled CTM, but it never really did finish, cos it hang during the uninstall after reboot
I let it run for 10 hours, but it was still stuck and no drive activity
I reset my machine
After the resetl my machine didn’t boot into windows anymore. I only got a black screen. I put the hard drive as secondary drive in an other machine and made again a copy of the MBR. I compared that MBR with the first 2 MBR copies. It did not match with the MBR that copy that i directly created after windows 7 installation, but it did match with the MBR copy that i created after the CTM installation. I wrote the MBR copy from after windows 7 installation back to the MBR and put the hard drive back in my machine. The drive did boot again and started windows without any problem. No CTM boot console and no CTM executable running in windows. I checked for the CTM installation on that drive, but it wasn’t there anymore. So it looks like the uninstaller had removed CTM, but it did not remove the CTM bootconsole entry from the MBR. Between words, i did use CSC to cleanup my registry from any left over CTM references.
Should it not be so that the uninstall process first removes the CTM bootconsole from MBR and only after success remove the CTM software from drive? Please look into this, because this might be 1 of the causes of the dead machines after uninstall.
My advice is that the installer should make a MBR copy prior at CTM installation and keep that copy at some safe place. Maybe installer should ask the user to put in a CD-R, DVD-R or USB key to create some sort of bootable CTM crash recovery disk/USB key. Then if the uninstall fails, then the user could use that disk/USB key to boot from it and it should automatically write back the MBR as it was prior to the CTM installation. After such a repair tools like CSC could then be used to clean up any left over registry references. It sort of should do the steps that i did manually to repair the drive.
PS: I did not discover any partition table corruption. Nor broken files.
I am so sorry that it took so long to reply and thank you for your test and feedback. I agree that it is a critical bug and I think we will fix it in next version. But I still have some questions. I noticed that you had had some music downloaded and some snapshots taken in your test, so what was the size of the music files? And do you remember the information displayed in screen when uninstall was hanging?
Ok, here are some details about the system:
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bits)
PC: Acer
CPU: Intel Quad Core 64 bits
HDD: 1 HDD with 2 partitions (I did install CTM to protect both)
Partition 1: 342GB (only windows 7 installed at that time)
Partition 2: 342GB
Partition 2 was empty at the time i installed CTM (166).
All downloaded files were stored on partition 2. In total it was around 100MB of data.
Yup, that part was easy to remember, because the screen was blank. I did the uninstall from out of windows (not from out of the boot console). Then at one point it said it needed to restart to continue the uninstall process, so i let it do so. I did not really look at the screen after that, but when i looked again after some time, then the screen was blank. Sorry, but i did not constantly look at the screen, cos i was busy putting my sons under the shower. I don’t think it would be a good idea to bring my pc into the bath room ;D
By the way, that pc is still unused andy ready to do the same test again with the oncomming CTM release. I really hope that it will be better. I like the idea behind CTM, but the number of critical bugs is just still too high
