Application Repair and Re-Install

Reinstall and/or Repair

I recently used WinXP Pro-SP2 to repair my OS installation and in the process used Partition Magic 8.0 and PMs Disk Mapper to change drive letters because Windows insisted on running the OS on a drive other than "C ". I now have the following problems:

1. I can't install an update (8.01) to Partition Magic because it can't find the source code. I get the error message: "The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it. G:EnglishSetupPartitionMagic.msi ". The PD disk IS in the CD Drive, which has been assigned the letter "G" by Windows.

1a. Uninstall does not work either and I get the same error message.

1b. I have tried manually deleting PM by changing the name of the directory and by using a registry cleaner (Registry First Aid) to search for and remove all keys referring to Partition Magic. I get the same error message.

1c. There are three registry keys that I cannot delete, either with REGEDIT or with Registry First Aid:
KLM\SystemControlSet002\Enum\Root\LEGACY_PQFSMONNT_ABE675CA_49DF_11D3-93F6-00104B64D07B000
KLM\SystemControlSet004\Enum\Root\LEGACY_PQFSMONNT_ABE675CA_49DF_11D3-93F6-00104B64D07B000
KLM\SystemCurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\LEGACY_PQFSMONNT_ABE675CA_49DF_11D3-93F6-00104B64D07B000

2. I tried to repair my Office XP Pro, but it just hangs during the setup process. When the Office disdisk inserted, an explorer window of its contents appears and then just sits there. When I click on "Setup.exe ", I get an error message saying that [B] "Another Setup is already running ". [/B] I have not experimented with this problem.

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I did encounter a few problems where applications (Lotus, Excel, Quicken) had trouble finding their data files, but they were easily resolved.

I believe that is not a problem specific to Partition Magic or Office, but rather to how the OS keeps track of installed programs. I apologize this issue has been addressed elsewhere this forum, but I have been unable to find any threads.

Any help would be appreciated. Regards, SteveN

 

What is the disk structure now and which is the boot partition? At what point in the repair did you use PM? Just to rename a partition? How many disks are there?

 

In addition to the information Sparrow asked for, what was the original issue that you were trying to fix with the repair?

A note about your item 1c - the only registry key you need to need to deal with is the one in CurrentControlSet. The other control sets are basically backups and would only be needed if you booted and selected 'last known good configuration' which would force the OS to use the most recent control set older than 'current'.

 

Newt and Sparrow:

I hope this answers your questions and gives you something to work with:

The disk is an 80 Gig hard drive partitioned to C, D, E, and F. All are NTFS. D, E, and F are in the extended partition. The boot info is in C and it appears as Active and Primary. This is the structure before and after my manipulations. There are two hard drives mounted in the box, one being a ghosted copy of the other (more on that later). I also use a Super Rack to make Ghost copies of the hard drive to store in separate locations. (Yes, I am probably paranoid about backup copies.) At most, I could have three hard drives installed, Primary master, primary slave, and secondary slave (the CD Drive is secondary master.)

The problem I was trying to fix was that I lost the Help and Services Service and Restore would not work properly, probably because of some strange Registry Fixer that was really a Breaker. I purchased a new version of XP Pro, with SP2 and used it to repair the OS. The repair worked and still appears to be working. So far, so good!

Then I used Ghost to make copies of the newly installed OS and Partition Magic to hide the partitions on the removeable drive. The problem came when Windows began booting from the slave hard drive (PM Labels as Disk 2), instead of the first (master) drive (Disk 1). When I hid the partitions on the salve drive, Windows would not boot from the master drive. I copied the good boot partition back to Disk 1 and allowed Partition Magic to do its Boot Mapping thing and that may have been where I created my problem.

I thought I had gotten things back to normal until I tried to upgrade Partition Magic (to 8.01) and load an add-in to Microsoft Word (from Google's Blog stuff). Neither of these worked, hence the problems outlined in my first posting.

A final question: How do I get rid of those registry keys in the CurrentControlSets and could they be the reason I can't upgrade the software.

Thanks for taking the time to help. Regards, SteveN

 

Ghosting Disks is tricky

I have heard lots of horror stories about Ghosting complete 'bootable physical disk drive' to another 'disk drive'. I have had essentially no problem Ghosting partitions to other partitions and then restroring copied partitions to their original locations. However, there appears to be a caveat to Ghosting complete drives with XP and 2K. My experience is reflected from -->
http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_4.htm

Quoting from above:

As I understand this issue, Windows XP "knows" which hardware was installed when it is shut down. XP has attached a volume identifier to each volume. When XP is restarted, it redetects the hardware and if the same, all is well.

When a disk is cloned, disk-to-disk, there will be two volumes with the same volume identifier. If the computer is restarted with both harddisks (the "source" and the "clone ") installed, XP will start from the "source ", detect the "clone" as new hardware and change the volume identifier since there can not be two volumes with the same volume identifier.

Nothing will be detected by the user until he/she takes out the "source" and makes the "clone" the boot drive. Now, XP can not boot because of the changed volume identifier.

The solution is simple when Ghost 2003 is used to do the disk-to-disk cloning. You don't let Ghost reset the computer and restart Windows but turn off the computer and remove the "clone" before restarting.

I've done this and it works when I've changed/upsized my drives.

I don't know how to fix your particular problem, but maybe this advice may keep someone using Ghost from doing this again.

Good Luck
Top Dog

 

Top Dog:

Interesting . . . .

I have been using Ghost to make images of my main drive for several years now. First, I ghosted the disk with the DOS disk. I used PartMagic to hide the partitions on the slave drive and removed the third, removeable disk from the computer. All usually worked well. Lately I have been using the Windows version included with Norton System Works 2003. Again, all seemed to work well unitl I ran into these latest problems.

I recently got a copy of Ghost 9.0, but just read that version 9 does not allow copy of a whole disk, only individual partitions on the disk. If this proves to be true, Ghost 9 may prove to be quite worthless.

I have read about NOT letting Windows restart before removing the cloned drive and it looks like that may be the best way to prevent the disk mixup that I now have to contend with.

Thanks for your help and suggestions. SN

 

Are you aware that you can change the drive/partition letters in XP without the need to use third party software?

 

Yes, I was vaguely aware of it but thought that the Partition Magic would be more convenient and easier to use. Live and Learn. Thanks.

 

Application Repair and Re-install: A Solution

This problem was resolved by using Windows Installer Clean-Up Utility to 'clean' the left-behind installation files of Office XP Pro and Partition Magic.

Solution: Download the latest version of the utility and select the target software from the list. Then reinstall the software from the installation disks and update as appropriate. I had some correspondence with the Windows Update Help Center and they also came up with the same suggestion, although it took them about a day longer to find it.

Suggested Prevention: If using Norton Ghost to clone hard drives for backup purposes, use the DOS version and DO NOT allow Windows to boot until you either remove the target disk (from its rack) or use another program (I use Partition Magic) in the DOS mode to hide the partitions if the target disk is permanently mounted in the computer (as a slave disk).

Thanks to Newt, Sparrow, and Top Dog for suggestions and help.

 

Thank you for the update. Always great to have closure on an issue.