Uninstall deleted everything in dir and all sub-directories?

Hi,

I installed Serviio a few days ago and after trying it out, decided to uninstall it.

Normally I am very organized with my folders and sub folders. For some reason I installed Serviio (I assume) in my multimedia sub folder. Foolishly I didn't double check the installer's suggested folder name, and by changing the default install location it removed the suggested folder altogether. Hence I'm assuming it was installed in my multimedia sub folder. (:\soft\multimedia). In my multimedia folder were 5-6 sub folders with a total of 30 or so multimedia related apps in other sub-sub folders...

The Serviio uninstaller deleted everything in my multimedia folder (Serviio files) and ALL sub-folders!!!!! It deleted around 30 apps that have nothing to do with Serviio. Now I accept partial blame for not installing it in its own sub folder, my bad, but an installer deleting everything, whether or not it was installed by said program, is completely unacceptable and frankly makes me think of a VIRUS. In fact the first thing I did was run a full virus scan, which was negative.

Thankfully it wasn't installed in the root folder, otherwise all my software would have been wiped out, that would have been far worse. My first response was to run an undelete program, but weirdly all but 4 of the executables were detectable. Which can only mean the Serviio uninstall routine, executes a wipe routine on executables, perhaps others as well.

Yes I have backups and will be able to recover pretty much everything, with a few hours of work, but it still shouldn't have happened.

Surprisingly I have found a post on this forum, briefly mentioning this, written Aug 2011, why hasn't it been fixed???

I didn't write this post to complain, at this point, it wouldn't change anything. I simply want this problem to be fixed, so that other users won't experience the same fate.

I uninstalled Serviio from a winxp service pack 3 installation.

Anybody else experience this ?

Thanks

[zip]

HI, sorry to hear that. The uninstaller will remove the Serviio folder and all its sub-folders. More specifically, I think it is also based on where the uninstaller.exe is located.

Can you post and example folder hierarchy you had and here Serviio was installed? Was it installed in its own folder of just copied all its files into your Multimedia folder?

I've done some changes to the uninstaller for the next version that should make it more secure for cases like this, hopefully.

Same thing happened to me. I just lost a few utilities that were easily re-installed.
The parent directory was "Util" Under that were Serviio, PSTool, A-MuxG directories (+ a couple of others)
After uninstall, the "Util" directory was gone as well as the other subfolders.

When I install, I always specify the installation directory rather than the default since I install to a drive separate from the boot/OS partition. I manually create the directory and browse to it during installation.

I am running Windows 2000 and I had to re-install JAVA before Serviio would work again, too.

[zip]

Same thing happened to me. I just lost a few utilities that were easily re-installed.
The parent directory was "Util" Under that were Serviio, PSTool, A-MuxG directories (+ a couple of others)

I assume uninstaller.exe was in Serviio and not in Util..?

Same thing happened to me. I just lost a few utilities that were easily re-installed.
The parent directory was "Util" Under that were Serviio, PSTool, A-MuxG directories (+ a couple of others)

I assume uninstaller.exe was in Serviio and not in Util..?

Correct. The "Util" directory had a few unrelated files in it but all of the Serviio related files would have been in the "Serviio" sub-directory.

[zip]

I can't reproduce it.

- I have d:\test
- Inside created Serviio folder and installed it in here (d:\test\Serviio)
- create d:\test\folder1
- uninstall Serviio
- d:\test\folder1 is still there

Any chance you first installed Serviio into d:\util and then moved its contents into d:\util\Serviio ?

Not that I remember but it had been a while - and of course, the evidence is gone now.
Personally, I would have assumed that moving Serviio to another directory after installation would not even work since the shortcuts and the Start Menu items (and registry settings?) would have all been pointing to the wrong folders.

Petr,

After examining results in an undelete program, I can confirm that I Installed serviio in d:\soft\multimedia . I didn't create its own folder, that's on me. Normally I would have installed in d:\soft\multimedia\dlna\serviio or something relatively close to that.

Funny thing is, when the uninstaller ran, it was taking to long, gut told me to abort at around 20%, but I convinced myself otherwise...Lessons learned


Thanks for your input and the modification !