Why does Avast! become corrupt if I do a System Restore?

On our shared computer (not this one), I have avast installed.

I did a System Restore, after the it was complete, avast would not run.
The protection modules didn’t run, so I had to reinstall it.

This has happened everything I do a restore.

Can this be avoided?

That is the whole point of a system restore going back to a point in time to resolve a problem (not mentioned why) can have unexpected repercussions as changes to avast may well also be reversed.

I find system restore to be less than perfect, so much so that I have it disabled and use a back-up and recovery strategy to replace it. A hard disk image weekly takes a bit by bit copy of the partition/s that can be restored as an exact copy. For me far more reliable than system restore, whilst after restoring the image I have to re-enter my registration key but that is all.

Generally, antivirus and firewalls have trouble with System Restore.
It is not a backup (image) of the disk and far than perfect.
It just work for minor installations, or even a driver update.

+1

How long after you installed Avast did you run system restore? If you install Avast then try to restore your system to a point before Avast was installed you are going to have problems. It won’t completely uninstall, but it won’t work right either.

Avast has been installed for about 5/6 months.

So, System Restore shouldn’t mess avast installation (in theory).

I did a system restore just 2 days ago because of a driver conflict, nothing happened to avast, but should I be worried?? ???

I did a system restore just 2 days ago because of a driver conflict, nothing happened to avast, but should I be worried??

Only if you restored your computer to a time before avast was installed…

Thanks!

How does one do that?

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

I use that, Tech, and when I do a clone of a disk Avast doesn’t start on the clone. In my case it’s simply that it’s not registered and so tells me that it’s out of date. Pasting in the key works, but I don’t know why this happens.
If I use Acronis (I’ve a Maxtor disk), Avast will start OK.

Several disk imaging tools do this as for some reason they don’t retain the unique disk/partition identity and avast is linked to that, so it effectively believes it has been installed on a new disk. This happens to me when I restore an image using Drive Image 7.1.

Thanks David, good to know that there’s a reason. It’s not too onerous - I just have to remember to stop the automatic connection until Avast is up and running again.

You’re welcome.

I use WHS (Windows Home Server). It is a bit more expensive than say a software package alone, but it will do image backups of every Windows PC on my home network as well as Time Machine backups for my Macs.

The Windows restores are full recovery ‘bare metal’ restores. i.e. boot for the recovery CD and tell it what PC image you want to restore. Reboot and you’re back up and running.