Uninstall Recovery Genius? Please

[Shot]

This was installed on some computers at a freinds shop without her knowledge. It was loaded and password protected by a Farang customer for no reason. It has really messed up her business.

Does anyone know how to uninstall without PW

She has tried the usual stuff, and emailed the company, but it seems this software program has been bought sold to several different companies.

Thanks.

[bobl]

Man, if it's what I think it is, that thing's ancient. It's also harder to get rid of than mono.

There is (was) a program to help with nuking it in the case of a lost password but it's from goldensoft who are no more, so finding it could be a challenge especially given it's age.

It's a pretty scary uninstall which involves, among other things, having to boot DOS and re-write your hard drive's MBR (master boot record) since that's where recovery genius lives.

Even if you went the route of reinstalling a fresh copy of windows it's not as simple as booting the install cd and reformatting your drive, since that won't wipe the boot sector.

Had lots of tabs open searching for stuff at the same time I've been typing, and just found this - seems like your best bet might be here: http://community.thaiware.com/index.php/topic/285932-recovery-genius-2-aciaineaaaaan/

At the very bottom of the posts on that forum, there's a download link for an uninstaller zip file which probably contains the 'remove.com' program you need.

Instructions seem quite basic - boot into DOS from a recovery disk, run the remove.com program, do an FDISK /MBR (which rewrites the master boot record) and in theory, it should be gone and you're golden. That said, I take no responsibility if you somehow end up with an unbootable machine.

Hope it goes without saying, make sure you dump all important user files on a flash or portable drive before you attempt this, just in case. If it goes fubar, recovering is trivial in terms of reinstalling windows etc - it's the user data that's irreplaceable.

[BlackPuddingBertha]

Back up your personal data. Format the hard drive. Reinstall Windows. Reinstall your software. Copy your data back.

Anything else will be a waste of time.

[rakman]

Get a DOS o/s download (if you have a floppy on the system) then use fdisk /mbr to rewrite the MBR.

There are other ways to create and boot a DOS cd to run the fdisk, for example, www.bootdisk.com

[bobl]

Back up your personal data. Format the hard drive. Reinstall Windows. Reinstall your software. Copy your data back.

Anything else will be a waste of time.

That would be a great way to kill an hour (or ten, depending how much software you're reinstalling and whether you install gigs of updates (I'm looking at you, microsoftupdate)) but won't get rid of a boot sector virus/program...

[Mrjlh]

Make sure you are in "administrator mode. Go to control panel, go to programs. Look for the program you want to remove from the list. If it is listed click on it. You'll be asked if you really want to uninstall. Say "yes". If it doesn't ask for a password, then it will uninstall. If it does not just exit the program. Do a google search for as program simiar to "password nuker". Several out there. Follow their instructions. Good luck.

[NeverSure]

Just fyi, I believe This will wipe the mbr if necessary. It will erase the whole disk though so every other option mentioned should be tried first. But if I was going to format and start over, this is how I'd do it.

Good luck.

[bobl]

I quickly had a look around for anything else to help. The site I linked in my previous post - the forum still exists but is not accepting new members because they've updated their site - so you can't register on the 'old' site in order to log into the forums in order to download the file. Other than that one, which was the most promising, I've (so far) been unable to find the file tucked away in anybody's archive.

One thing I did find, was that the default password is 12345678 - so I'd suggest running the uninstaller again and trying that - there's a good chance the guy who installed it didn't put a password so it's using the program's default.

[Shot]

Thank you very much for all the replies.

She did try the default 12345678, but no luck.

I'll have her try some of the other suggestions, and report back.

Thanks again

Shot

[Crossy]

If this app is as hard to get rid of as it seems by far the quickest fix would be to copy off vital data then replace the hard drive and reload applications. Drives are cheap enough these days that this is a viable option for one machine.

You can then clean up the original drive at your leisure to use in the second machine, repeat as necessary.

[ETatBKK]

take the password protected HDD from the original machine to a proper running machine and install it as an external drive. this reduces the effect of the password and you may gain a better control. then COPY the data to a safe storage.

as suggested above, get a new HDD and reinstall the system. sounds a bit clumsy yet you have 100% control on what you do. pay more money and time, buy control.

[bobl]

I'm having to make a lot of (educated - ICT is my field for 35 years) guesses here but you could try:

1. Boot from floppy or CD, into DOS

2. Do an FDISK /MBR

3. Boot the machine, and run MSCONFIG

4. In the services and startup tabs, disable anything that points to the goldensoft directory

5. Reboot. Chances are, recovery genius won't be running or resident.

6. Delete the entire directory c:\program files\goldensoft

7. Go to add/remove programs and try to remove recovery genius. It should tell you it can't find it and that it may have been manually removed, and "would you like to remove it from the list of installed programs"

8. Optionally (like (7), this is just a housekeeping exercise), use regedit to search for anything referring to goldensoft and delete those keys (or use a decent registry cleaner that gets rid of stale/orphaned entries)

Of course, repeating again make sure you've got any data you want to keep, copied off before you start.

If the above doesn't work I'd concur with the advice to simply replace the HD and build a new machine from scratch, or (starting with an fdisk /mbr and an fdisk / delete the existing partition table) a fresh install on the existing disk. Not knowing anything about the hardware, I still think that's a last resort because you might run into driver issues (if it's a branded computer I'd advise visiting their support site before you start and make sure you have all their drivers and updates for that machine to hand, before you start).

[BlackPuddingBertha]

Back up your personal data. Format the hard drive. Reinstall Windows. Reinstall your software. Copy your data back.

Anything else will be a waste of time.

That would be a great way to kill an hour (or ten, depending how much software you're reinstalling and whether you install gigs of updates (I'm looking at you, microsoftupdate)) but won't get rid of a boot sector virus/program...

Big deal. Fdisk/MBR it whilst reinstalling. Win7 will do this automatically if it doesnt like the look of the MBR anyway.

Not much point moaning about the time taken to reinstall. If this sort of crap is on a machine then you can pretty well guarantee that a load of other crap will be there too, and so the whole lot should be wiped.

Any machine to which "customers" have access should be set up with a fully updated, fully set-up and clean image on another partition/drive anyway, so that this can be restored on a regular basis, and now would seem like a good time to put this in place on this machine. I always set up my clients' office machines like this.

[bobl]

Back up your personal data. Format the hard drive. Reinstall Windows. Reinstall your software. Copy your data back.

Anything else will be a waste of time.

That would be a great way to kill an hour (or ten, depending how much software you're reinstalling and whether you install gigs of updates (I'm looking at you, microsoftupdate)) but won't get rid of a boot sector virus/program...

Big deal. Fdisk/MBR it whilst reinstalling. Win7 will do this automatically if it doesnt like the look of the MBR anyway.

Not much point moaning about the time taken to reinstall. If this sort of crap is on a machine then you can pretty well guarantee that a load of other crap will be there too, and so the whole lot should be wiped.

Any machine to which "customers" have access should be set up with a fully updated, fully set-up and clean image on another partition/drive anyway, so that this can be restored on a regular basis, and now would seem like a good time to put this in place on this machine. I always set up my clients' office machines like this.

I didn't mean to offend, simply pointed out the irony of saying "waste of time" then suggesting another (potential) waste of time... Nor was I moaning about the time it takes to get a useful machine up from scratch, simply a fact.

As I said, given the info at hand I made several guesses/assumptions - one of which is this:

Lady is perhaps running an internet cafe. Machines were getting messed up constantly by customers. Former friend helped out by installing recovery genius, and setting it to restore the 'clean machine' on each reboot. Problem solved, until the day comes when you need to update anything and/or install new software and don't want it to revert to the original install. So, I based my advice on the possibility that the machine IS clean and all that needs to be done is for recovery genius to be gotten rid of.

It's equally possible that the conclusion you've reached, machine if full of crap, is correct. If it was me, I'd still try to fix it before nuking it. I do agree with your philosophy of keeping an image that can be restored when/if necessary, I also did that with my clients. Ironically, that's one of the things this 'recovery genius' was designed to do.

[Shot]

Lady is perhaps running an internet cafe. Machines were getting messed up constantly by customers. Former friend helped out by installing recovery genius, and setting it to restore the 'clean machine' on each reboot. Problem solved, until the day comes when you need to update anything and/or install new software and don't want it to revert to the original install. So, I based my advice on the possibility that the machine IS clean and all that needs to be done is for recovery genius to be gotten rid of.

Yes, this is pretty much the case. She was using Shadow Mode to prevent the computers from accumulating junk, but it was not PW protected. Unfortunately, it was not a friend, but a complete stranger that loaded, and PW protected Recovery Genius. A real D-bag, that has caused a very hard working local a lot of time, and soon some money.

She decided to hire a local computer guy to format, erase (I don’t know the proper term) the hard drives and install Win 7. He will also install Deep Freeze with PW to prevent this from happening in the future.

Really appreciate all he help.

Sincerely,

Shot

[Thali]

When i set up Windows 98, there i observed an issue. As found and examined to restart many times, and the same message is appearing, but after pushing any key it seems to have no issue. I really want to resolve the issue.

Any suggestions would be nice. Thanks