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mgshn's avatar
mgshn
Level 3
12 years ago

Former Ghost 15 user - Getting trapped in the SSR 2013 Trial

A few days ago I had an issue with doing a system restore using Ghost 15.  I went to that forum for help and learned that Symantec was going to discontinue Ghost and recommended users "check out" SSR 2013 with its free trial.

I downloaded the free trial and eventually learned it would not install unless I first remove Ghost.  That wasn't from anything that I saw when the SSR installation failed; that happened without any additional information.  However, I did eventually find my way to this forum and a helpful Guru pointed out the issue and also that I could always re-install Ghost if I wasn't happy with SSR.

I uninstalled Ghost, installed SSR, and started backing stuff up.  Now, if one of the things you want to do is a full system restore (my primary interest) then you need a recovery disk.  SSR will make a recovery disk for you and all you need to do is provide an activation key which you don't get with the trial version. 

No problem, as all I need to do is install Ghost.  But I can't install Ghost until I uninstall SSR.  And SSR WILL NOT UNINSTALL.  Whenever I try to uninstall it there's an Error 2738 and something about a VBasic error.

So now I have a trial verision of a program that I can't use and a paid for program I can no longer load.

I guess it can all be fixed if I pay Symantec for an activation key for a program that I'm not sure I want in the hopes it will maybe allow me to upgrade to a latter version that can uninstall so I can install the program I uninstalled so I could evaluate the Free Trial.

To put it another way, I may have to pay Symantec to I can remove their free software and load back the software I paid them for as well.

And, even it it turns out there's a simple, and hopefully less expensive, way out of this I've still wasted a lot of time on what should be a free trial of a comercial product which appears to be more of an alpha test.

(If I sound upset, it's because I really am)

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  • criley's avatar
    criley
    Moderator
    12 years ago

    I'm not passing the buck here but I am not a licensing expert. You need to contact our licensing team - they should be able to help:

    http://www.symantec.com/support/assistance_care.jsp

  • Geoff_HH's avatar
    Geoff_HH
    Level 2
    12 years ago

    Having only just been notified about the discontinuation of Norton Ghost 15, I am fascinated by this whole discussion thread. It appears that Symantec does not really care about current Ghost customers; perhaps there are too few to impact Symantec's worldwide profitability.

    One would have expected that if Symantec was serious about retaining and transferring Ghost users to SSR, there would have been:

    1. an employee on this forum who could actually answer and take responsibility for clarifiying customers' Ghost to SSR issues
    2. a clear, official company statement about the ease (or otherwise) of moving from Ghost to SSR
    3. an Appendix in the SSR User's Guide about converting from Ghost to SSR.

    Like us, most users of this forum probably have too little time to waste trying to get clear answers to our queries. If Symantec is not sufficiently concerned about this group of existing users, perhaps the time has come to switch to say Acronis True Image as a backup/restore solution; we have found this excellent even though the user interface is a little complex to start with. At least then, one would not have to uninstall Ghost first (although obviously not running the two programs at the same time!). Just as an aside, I would mention that we have found the traditionally "big" companies like McAfee and Symantec are becoming complacent about their customer base. As far as Internet Security products go, we are now recommending Bitdefender (read the comparative reviews).

     

    Geoff