Very bad experience with ASC Pro v6 and Windows 8

[green_bobblin]

I have been using ASC for several years, I think since v3 and I have never had a problem, until now. Please forgive the very long post, as I tried to capture all the details so that hopefully this will benefit anyone else who has something similar to report, or whoever may find time to offer me some input.

 

I recently upgraded my system from Windows 7 to 8. After that, I installed ASC v6 but never did a scan/repair before on my Windows 8 until today. I ran the full scan, along with deep registry clean. The rest of the options were mainly the defaults.

 

I let the full scan run, along with the repair afterwards. My observations in the past were that ASC automatically creates a restore point or backup before running the repair, so at this point my thinking was that ASC would do the usual backup before applying changes.

 

The scan+repair completed without any errors, and I restarted my system. During the restart, Windows 8 did a disk scan during bootup (which I assume was triggerred by ASC). I wasn't paying much attention while the system was booting, but I think after the disk scan completed there was another reboot as I heard my computer beep and I was prompted for the power on password.

 

After Windows 8 came up, this is where the trouble began. When I logged in with my usual userid, the logon procedure took a very long time. When it finally logged me in, my Start Menu was replaced with what looked like an almost bare or default one. There were only 3 or 4 tiles. I clicked to go into the desktop, and I saw all my icons on the desktop, but the background was different and I also got a warning popup indicating that Windows 8 was running in a TEMPORARY PROFILE and that I should log out and back in again.

 

I signed off and logged back in again, and even rebooted the system, but every time the log in would take a long time. During the login I would see the message "preparing your desktop", which is unusual. And each time, the same problem.

 

I did some research on the temporary profile issue, and came upon this thread.

 

I followed the advice in one of the posts by user DiagoFox, which mentioned that they searched their registry and found this key:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

 

They stated that if you look within one of the sub-keys under ProfileList, you will find a key called 'ProfileImagePath'. The user indicated that after they made a change on their system to ensure that key is pointing to the right profile directory (under the C:\USERS dir), their problem was resolved.

 

Not thinking too much at this point, I checked my registry and noted there was a new profile entry with ProfileImagePath C:\Users\TEMP. So I changed this path within regedit to the correct path of my user profile directory (I did not make any changes to actual directory names, just the key in the registry).

 

Simple enough, I didn't think there would be any problems.

 

Next I wanted to log out and log back in to test the change. The log out took a really long time, and the hard drive was chugging along for what seemed like a good 15 minutes. When it was done and I restarted the system, the same scenario was still there - the logon took a long time (still seeing message "Preparing desktop.." during login), Start Menu looked bare, and I was again using a temporary profile.

 

It was at this time, that I noticed I had about 150GB more free space on my hard drive. When I checked my old user profile dir, all of my photos, music and documents were missing!

 

I don't know if the missing files issue happened before or after the registry change I made, but the only reason I made the change was to try and resolve a problem (possibly corrupt registry) triggered after a routine ASC scan and repair. According to the Microsoft link above, the OP experienced the temporary profile condition and their error logs stated that the Registry may have gotten corrupted.

 

When I launched ASC at this point to check logs, review backups or do a restore, there is nothing there to restore and no logs. Even when I load Windows Restore, there were hardly any restore points, as though the system was referring to the restore history of a temporary account. I don't know exactly what was removed from my registry, but the deep clean indicated something like 1300 fixes.

 

I restarted Windows in recovery mode and chose to restore an existing restore point from Nov 27. It took about 30 minutes to restore, and I was hopeful that my data and everything else I had lost was going to be back. After this restore, the temporary login issue was resolved and it seemed all my Windows settings/desktop were back in place. However, all my data (around 100gb or so) are still missing, as though they are permanently deleted. It's really strange in that I see a couple of directories left over in My Documents, but everything else is gone. My Music folder contains all the dirs, but absolutely no files in any dir. It's a real mess, and I would never have expected to have to deal with an issue to this extent.

 

So as it stands right now, I am running an undelete program to try and recover my data files. Thankfully I have a current backup of My Documents folder, but not my photos or music collection. I had some old stuff going back many years. I know, I know, I should have backed this stuff up.

 

Right now, I am more concerned with finding out what the hell went wrong.

 

This is definitely a very negative experience for me with this product, and it clearly suggests it is not ready for prime time use with Windows 8. I have used the product to perform 100s of scans and repairs before, and nothing even remotely similar to this has happened before. Up until now I was happy with ASC and had a lot of confidence in it, and that's why I didn't worry much before running a scan on my new Windows 8 system. But now I am scared to ever run this program on Windows 8 again. To the authors of ASC - you should make a clear note on your website indicating if the product is indeed fully tested to support Windows 8, because I do not think it is. Your System Requirements page shows that Microsoft® Windows® 8 is a supported OS, and that's the only reason I ran a scan (I was very hesitant to do it up until now).

 

If anyone has any ideas of what might have gone wrong, I would really appreciate any feedback.

 

Thanks.

[Scannan]

Hi Greenbobblin

 

Welcome. I am sorry you are experiencing difficulties. Thank you for such a descriptive post. Your issue is a mix of W8 and ASC issues, and as such I believe the best course of action is for you to send this issue directly to Iobit. You can do this at: support@iobit.com

 

Tell the the details exactly as you have posted them here. Please also reference this thread in your email.

 

We could offer advice and ask more questions and suggest possible solutions, but I think in your case it would be best to let Iobit know of this issue and to enable them to assist.

[enoskype]

green_bobblin, welcome to the IObit Forum!

 

Addition to Scannan's suggestion, detailed information about your OS, security softwares and exact versions of the IObit softwares will be helpful.

 

Also, please fill in your User Profile in User CP of the Forum.

 

Cheers.

[solbjerg]

Hi green_bobblin

Just one question at this time: Did you check your settings prior to running ASC6 for the first time?

Cheers

solbjerg

[green_bobblin]

Hey guys, thanks for the welcome and your suggestions.

 

I have been working on this since the weekend, and have made some progress.

 

For the loss of data I experienced, here is what I think happened:

 

1. ASC scan/repair with deep registry clean
   
2. Somehow Windows 8 registry becomes corrupted or damaged, causing windows to log me in with a temporary profile
   
3. The registry change I made in OP caused Windows 8 to think that my user dir had changed to C:\users\old.account immediately
   
4. Since Windows XP, apparently a temporary profile gets deleted or cleaned out after you log out
   
5. When I logged out, Windows 8 mass deleted my entire user folder (c:\users\old.account)
   

 

If I never made this registry change, my user data would still have been there. You would think Windows would detect such a change, or warn that it is about to delete all the contents of a certain temp profile if the user dir is like over several hundred MB (in my case 1000s or files and 10s of GB).

 

This whole exercise made me really appreciate the value of not only having backups, but making those backups on a daily basis or regular schedule. I also got a chance to review a few backup tools to share my findings with you.

 

I managed to recover quite a bit of my data thankfully, by using the data recovery/undelete program "Piriform Recuva." I've never used it before, but it had very good reviews for being a free product.

 

In the end, I wasn't able to fully recover everything as there were lots of files recovered but they were overwritten as some point, therefore the recovered file wasn't usable. This is probably because I did a system restore beforehand, and whatever work it did restoring my user profile may have also overwritten clusters of the disk which contained the deleted data.

 

I will be backing up the entire C:\Users\* from now on.

 

Also, I found that the open source program FreeFileSync to be an excellent tool for doing your backups, and this is what I am using. I restored my entire My Documents folder from my Linux server, using FreeFileSync and everything was working fine (except for the fact that I didn't make a recent backup in about 3 weeks).

[Melvin_Deal]

Aye and Cudos green_bobblin!

 

Glad you are making progress!

 

If I never made this registry change, my user data would still have been there.

You must be very careful with your registry.

I recently upgraded my system from Windows 7 to 8. After that, I installed ASC v6 but never did a scan/repair before on my Windows 8 until today. I ran the full scan, along with deep registry clean. The rest of the options were mainly the defaults.

The deep clean is risky unless you want to do alot of work. Piriform tools are fine ones.

I managed to recover quite a bit of my data thankfully, by using the data recovery/undelete program "Piriform Recuva."

Wonderful idea about backing up... there is much information on this forum concerning that... I hope you will be imaging as part of your back up plan.

I will be backing up the entire C:\Users\* from now on.

 

 

Sincerely,

-Mel

Live long and prosper!

[deathracer]

I was hit by this issue too

 

I ran a scan yesterday and had almost the same issue as green_bobblin

 

(quoting from "green_bobblin")

- Next time I restarted Windows 8 after the scan...

- Logon procedure took a very long time.

- When it finally logged in, the Start Menu was replaced with what looked like an almost bare or default one.

- There were only 3 or 4 tiles. I clicked to go into the desktop, and I saw all my icons on the desktop, but the background was different and I also got a warning popup indicating that Windows 8 was running in a TEMPORARY PROFILE and that I should log out and back in again.

- I tried to rebuild my desktop settings manually, but the next time I rebooted, I had the same blank desktop with the warning popup that Windows 8 was running in a TEMPORARY PROFILE and that I should log out and back in again.

 

> I did not have the Registry Deep Clean option enabled (even though I have Pro edition)

> I did not lose any of my documents/photos, etc...

> Only my profile was messed up

 

ACTION taken: I did a Windows System restore from 1 week ago and my profile was restored perfectly.

 

Now that I was restored, I ran ASC again, just to see if I could invoke the problem, but reboot was normal....

So it seems that this problem is random??

 

Note:

while troubleshooting this problem, I did view this web posting:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-system/temporary-profile-on-windows-8/a1f2c090-74c2-4c87-acbb-c0c893c2b0fa

 

In my case, in my C:\Users\Username folder, there were extra occurences of "ntuser" files with a tilda character ~

 

After Windows system restore my C:Users\Username folder looked normal

So it seems it's this folder that got corrupted by ASC

 

cheers

[scrd01]

log details

 

Hi Deathracer,

could you supply a copy of the log file for this.

 

it would be extremely helpfull,

(screenshot is for ASCU but ASC6 has the same options).

 

Roy