Uninstalling Origin has just caused me extreme problems

[Holofernes]

I don't get it. You don't have a separate SSD or at the very least partition for the OS? Because as an advanced user you should know not to install anything you might wanna keep in case of a format in the proverbial C:.

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Well, no. A proper uninstaller only removes the files it initially installed, not the whole damn folder, regardless of content.

A proper uninstall routine deletes everything associated with the files, the folders too.

I dont know how you are able to delete a folder without deleting everything that is in that folder, but hey enlighten me. As far as i know, the functionality of what deleting a folder means is the same on dos, unix and mac os system, since like the 1980s.

So i have no idea where your magical "delete the folder, but not the data in the folder" idea comes from.

[Charge me Doctor]

Well, no. A proper uninstaller only removes the files it initially installed, not the whole damn folder, regardless of content.

Really? In this case it will leave an empty folder (or a folder with files created after installation of a program), plus whatever it was created in \my documents\
I guess it's the case of personal preferences, but i don't like programs leaving cache and other crap on my HD after i uninstall them, so when a program is installed into C:\Program Files\Origin and %userprofile%\documents\Origin i expect them to be gone after i uninstall Origin, not left in there because "uninstaller should only delete things it installed" (i suppose you mean that files should have some sort of tag for uninstaller to recognize them?)

[Advo]

OP sounds like the kind of person that ruins tech support workers dreams.

[Deleted]

Really.. No uninstaller has ever removed its entire folder? Well, doesn't that speak for every other uninstaller being shit?
I HATE when uninstallers leave their folder.. I told it to uninstall.. Then it should fucking remove it..
However, luckly most uninstallers I've used, has removed it's entire folder.. As it should..

I'm sorry that you expect them to leave files on your PC after an uninstall, but that is damn shitty practice.

I expect a uninstaller to leave it's folder if there are files in that folder that are modified, added or don't belong to the program.
In the past i also expected them to have a popup with "do you want to delete your settings/saved games" and then leave that file in the folder if you said no, but nowadays a lot of those type of files are hushed away to appdata or my documents for the very reason that a lot of installers deleted them without asking.

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(i suppose you mean that files should have some sort of tag for uninstaller to recognize them?)

isn't that what commonly used checksums are for?

[Xenryusho]

You mean all thanks to you.



Right there. You said it. You did it. Not them. Why blame someone else for what you did?


As for fixing it, without a restore point, probably just gonna have to re-install them all. I have to agree with the above poster though, why in the world do you need 400 games installed at once? Also, why would you want games installed on your HDD when you have an SSD?

What I do, and I do play a lot of games, is install the games I am currently playing on the SSD. Since I can't really play more than one game at a time, I only ever have two to three games installed since taste can differ from night to night or sometimes I'll get frustrated with a game and want to play something else. 2-3 games installed at a time keeps me able to have a variety. Once I am done playing a game, I'll back-up the saves and then uninstall it, to make room for another game. No need to have 400 some odd games installed at one time.

WOW, the hoops someone will jump through to defend EA. This is like writing a utility script that enables globstar matching to remove a single file, it's basically just malicious code at that point.

A proper uninstall routine deletes everything associated with the files, the folders too.

I dont know how you are able to delete a folder without deleting everything that is in that folder, but hey enlighten me. As far as i know, the functionality of what deleting a folder means is the same on dos, unix and mac os system, since like the 1980s.

So i have no idea where your magical "delete the folder, but not the data in the folder" idea comes from.

Holy shit the number of people who don't know how a file system works. Remove the inode that references the files, the files still exist on disc, their inodes are still there, there's just no reference to them... Like this is EXACTLY why rm uses the -r flag for deleting directories, it RECURSIVELY deletes everything inside so it doesn't leave un-referenced files.

[therealbowser]

Things you mentioned above are really hard to believe. I even attempted to install Origin myself and it easily installed into D:\Program Files\Origin. I don't think that E:\ or D:\ or C:\ make any difference. Probably you missed a slash or had a typo, or something like that, but it's definitely not origins fault.
Some programs do create their own folder, but some do not, most of the time you can tell them apart of wording used in installation process, but again, general rule of thumb is that C:\Folder\SubFolder\ means that files will be installed here, not in C:\Folder\SubFolder\WTFIDidntAskYouToCreateThisFolder\

Again its all dumbs down to lack of attention while installing programs. It may bite you in the ass by installing Rambler Bar or Dr Web or some shit like that. The habit of clicking "next" should die in early 2000s, it would be way better of PC community

It's impossible that I made a typo, since I literally replaced C: with E:. It was exactly the same. This is how I originally created program files on that HDD.

I always check and double check things like this, however I did not know what I was checking for nor did I know that there were programs that uninstalled like this (I've never encountered it or heard of it). If I knew there was a danger, I would have simply deleted it directly and removed the registry.

The fact it:

1. Did not let me create the folder
2. Did not create its own folder.
3. When uninstalled, deleted everything.

...caused me this problem. I don't blame it for 3, but I do blame it for 1 and 2 (combined, not separately. Either would have prevented this). Programs should be capable of creating folders to suit an installation path in 2017, certainly a program as popular as Origin. As mentioned before, I was able to Ctrl+alt+delete it once I realized what was going on. The fact it took so long to uninstall should have been a warning sign, but I let it do its thing. But I digress.

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OP sounds like the kind of person that ruins tech support workers dreams.

I'll take that as a compliment.

[Charge me Doctor]

isn't that what commonly used checksums are for?

Checksum will be changed if a file was changed, i'm not sure how uninstaller should keep track of it

[Vargur]

Really? In this case it will leave an empty folder (or a folder with files created after installation of a program), plus whatever it was created in \my documents\
I guess it's the case of personal preferences, but i don't like programs leaving cache and other crap on my HD after i uninstall them, so when a program is installed into C:\Program Files\Origin and %userprofile%\documents\Origin i expect them to be gone after i uninstall Origin, not left in there because "uninstaller should only delete things it installed" (i suppose you mean that files should have some sort of tag for uninstaller to recognize them?)

Yeah, the program's uninstaller generally has a list of files that should uninstall. Sometimes you don't want the user created files to be gone, regardless if they're in the same folder or Users, sometimes you do.
I personally prefer non-installable software, I always look for archives whenever possible.

[Alantor]

I've laughed so hard reading @OP, thanks.

[Quibble]

I did not choose to ignore any warning.

You keep saying you did not ignore any warning. But this is just not true.

This was your process:

1: Open Origin Installer. See that it will install to C:/Program Files/Origin
2: Click on Browse. This opens a window of file explorer.
3: Change the path in the title bar from C:/Program Files/Origin to E:/Program Files/Origin.

Now Windows gives you a warning, "Windows can't find E:/Program Files/Origin, check your spelling and try again".
It does not create new folders if you happen to tell it to go to a folder that does not exist.. Never has.

4: You click OK, now Windows think you are choosing E:/Program Files and it returns this path to the Origin Intaller.

The Origin Installer now says it's gonna install to E:/Program Files

5: You click install.

It all comes down to you choosing to ignore the warning from windows when you tried to go to a folder that did not exist.

I am not going to take blame for how Origin installed itself when even the most amateur software writer can make a program do something as simple as create its own folder when you make a specific path

Yes.. It's true that any programmer should be able to make a installer that create new folders, if you give it a path with folders that doesn't exist already.
However, origin has for some reason not allowed you to write a path manually, but ask you to use windows file explorer to locate a folder..

That you choose to ignore warnings given to you by Windows, really can't be blamed on Origin.

I can agree, that the Origin installer could have been designed better.
But it still isn't their fault that you ignored windows and then either ignored the new install path in the origin installer.. or assumed they would make a subfolder, when it doesn't say so in the install path.

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I have made the mistake of installing directly in my D:/Program Files/ too. When I did that the program didn't create a subfolder, because why would it create a subfolder inside the folder you told it to install in.

If I told it to install in "D:/Program Files/O-Launcher/ I wouldn't expect it to make another subfolder called Origin inside O-Launcher.

I manually deleted all files belonging to the program I accidently installed to program files.
I don't remember why I didn't use an uninstaller.

[Lathais]

WOW, the hoops someone will jump through to defend EA. This is like writing a utility script that enables globstar matching to remove a single file, it's basically just malicious code at that point.

It has nothing to do with defending EA. I don't play any EA games and I do not and have never had Origin Installed.

It's quite simple really though. OP CHANGED THE INSTALL PATH on his own to install directly to E:\Program Files WITHOUT a sub folder. He tried to leave the sub-folder there, Windows told him it was not there, so HE LEFT THE INSTALL PATH as e:\Program Files instead of Creating the sub-folder when he got a notification that IT WAS NOT GOING TO DO WHAT HE THOUGHT. He ignored that warning, installed to E:\Program Files and when he went to Uninstall, it deleted it's root folder, which was E:\Program Files. It did EXACTLY what HE told it to do and he is blaming someone else. That is not defending EA and has nothing to do with EA. It has to do with him not paying attention and installing without a sub-folder, like the program TRIED to do, but he changed, on his own, then ignored the warning that popped up. It's really as simple as that. Just because he has not seen it happen before doesn't mean a thing. This has been a thing for a long long time. Ignorance is not an excuse.

[Artorius]

You bring up fair points, and you can argue that it was my fault, but I simply disagree.

M8, you told the installer to install in a certain folder and the installer did its job which was installing in that specific folder. That has always been the case and only few exceptions (if any) will create a redundant subfolder if you don't explicitly tell it to.

For every program that I can recall in the last decade, when I wrote up a manual path, it installed to that path and created a folder.

I'd find this extremely unlikely. Those are rare programs and they're basically doing an extra step you didn't specify it to do.

You can debate this however you wish, but this is bad programming and stuff like this was inevitably going to cause a problem to someone, somewhere. Just because you haven't seen posts about it doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

Creating a new folder by default without the user telling it to is bad programming. The installer installed it where you told it to install, this isn't rocket science.

Now look, I am not going to take blame for how Origin installed itself when even the most amateur software writer can make a program do something as simple as create its own folder when you make a specific path -- that would have literally solved every problem and made this fluid and simple.

This would also mean any other user would unnecessarily have a folder inside another folder for no reason. I'm not going to say that it would change the world and people would absolutely hate to click another folder before getting to the folder they wanted but I've honestly never seen any cases of your problem besides yours. Maybe everyone else is just used to tell the installer to create a folder when they change the default directory, for some reason you don't by habit and that's what I find weird. You claim every other program you installer in the last decade did it by default, which is also weird because they don't majoritarily.

The best consolation I can offer is that I should have known better, but how could I have known when I've never experienced or heard of this happening before?

Honestly, just path things correctly in the installer the next time and you won't ever have to deal with this kind of problem again. And I understand that it might be upsetting reading people telling you constantly that it was your fault when in your head things worked differently.

We can indeed make the uninstaller smarter and check the directories before deleting everything. I won't say that deleting everything is the "wrong" way to do because it works most of the time. But it isn't the best possible way to do things either, an uninstaller should know what to delete and what doesn't have anything to do with it. Thing is, most front-end software developers are extremely lazy and won't even think of this possibility.

[Lathais]

1. Did not let me create the folder
2. Did not create its own folder.
3. When uninstalled, deleted everything.

...caused me this problem. I don't blame it for 3, but I do blame it for 1 and 2 (combined, not separately. Either would have prevented this). Programs should be capable of creating folders to suit an installation path in 2017, certainly a program as popular as Origin. As mentioned before, I was able to Ctrl+alt+delete it once I realized what was going on. The fact it took so long to uninstall should have been a warning sign, but I let it do its thing. But I digress.

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I'll take that as a compliment.

1) And Windows told you the folder was not there and it would not be created, which should have prompted you to manually create it.
2) When you told it to, it told you that folder was not there and would not be created. You left it off without creating it.
3) All it did was delete it's own folder. The folder you told it to install to, which while not 100% of programs do this, is quite common.

So you blame it for 3 because you ignore what it told you in 1 and 2. Ok, that makes total sense.

As for programs should be capable of that in 2017, if anything, it's harder and harder for programs to do this on their own, not easier, as Windows gets more and more complex and you need more permissions to add things than you used to.

Also, you bring up the point of how popular Origin is, which really just works against you. As popular as it is, you would think more people would have had this issue. They have not. So it MUST be something YOU did. If the program did it all on it's own, a lot more people would be having this problem. They simply are not though. Just accept the fact that you did not understand the warnings presented to you therefore you messed up and you caused this, not them. As long as you keep blaming them, people will keep telling you it is your fault, because it is.

[Deleted]

Now Windows gives you a warning, "Windows can't find E:/Program Files/Origin, check your spelling and try again".
It does not create new folders if you happen to tell it to go to a folder that does not exist.. Never has.

More likely he read it as "windows cant find folder, would you like to create it?", which i see a lot more often then your version, which sounds more like one of those installers which has like windows 95 style folder management in it.

[Quibble]

More likely he read it as "windows cant find folder, would you like to create it?", which i see a lot more often then your version, which sounds more like one of those installers which has like windows 95 style folder management in it.

More than my version? Would you kindly open up windows file explorer and write a path that doesn't exist?
It will not create a new folder..

Most installers today probably just allow you to put in a path manually. And the coders of the installer would make sure that the folder is created.
But not all does, this installer asked you to use windows file explorer.. And just because it was opened through an installer, does not suddenly change the functionality of windows file explorer.

As I said.. OP not only ignored a warning from windows.. He also ignored that the installer now wrote "E:/Program Files" and not "E:/Program Files/Origin"..
And assumed that for some stupid reason, which goes against how basicly every other installer works, that the installer would now make another subfolder inside the folder he told it to install in.

[Deleted]

More than my version? Would you kindly open up windows file explorer and write a path that doesn't exist?
It will not create a new folder..

Most installers today probably just allow you to put in a path manually. And the coders of the installer would make sure that the folder is created.
But not all does, this installer asked you to use windows file explorer.. And just because it was opened through an installer, does not suddenly change the functionality of windows file explorer..

yes. and because a modern installer will say "WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE IT?" instead of "CHECK SPELLING" it's easy to assume that that's what OP think he clicked on.

[Quibble]

yes. and because a modern installer will say "WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE IT?" instead of "CHECK SPELLING" it's easy to assume that that's what OP think he clicked on.

This is just fucking stupid..

If you don't know how windows file explorer works, why the fuck would you be so insanely stupid as to ignore the warnings and not read them?

THE INSTALLER DID NOT ALLOW YOU TO WRITE A PATH MANUALLY.

IT MAKES YOU USE WINDOWS FILE EXPLORER.

WINDOWS FILE EXPLORER DOES NOT CREATE FOLDERS IF YOU GIVE IT AN INCORRECT PATH.

It really doesn't matter what a modern installer, which allow you to manually input a path does.. When this one made you use windows file explorer, which you should fucking know how works when it's the operating system you use.