Re: Help! Office 2000 pro install broke my win2k box

Hi Dave,

Hmmm. Ouch.

Visual Studio and MS Office both use MSI
files and the MS Installer. It may be that your
user profile has become corrupted, setup.exe for
Office wouldn't be able to unmount a drive that
I can recall, but you may want to also post in
the Windows 2000 newsgroup as well on this.

If the tree names for Microsoft Office in the registry
are correct then the installer cleanup utility may still
prune the tree successfully for you, although you may
want to also be sure your Windows Installer is current.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301&FR=1

=========
<<"Dave Brown" <softwaredave@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1121116475.284938.53520@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Apologies, this turned out to be a long one....

I made the mistake of using an NTFS mounted striped partition as
c:\program files, and another striped partition as c:\documents and
settings. I've just got some new hard drives and wanted to put an
uberfast machine together.
Everything is fine, installed Visual Studio and all my other apps,
worked on it for a week, sweet, then installed Office 2000 Pro. Bang.
Everything went horrible, everything died. Rebooted to find that all my
documents and applications were gone. Everything. And I had a new
desktop. And my profile folder had been changed to "my name.my
computername". And my original profile folder was empty.

After one heart attack, and cutting a long story short...
What had happened is that my mounted partitions had been dismounted and
were in limbo, and the installer had created new, empty, c:\documents
and settings and c:\program files, into which office had been
installed.
On top of that, things were... well, clunky.
Luckily, I figured out what had happened because the folder icons had
changed from a "drive" icon (for the mounted partitions) to a normal
folder icon.
When I ran disk management, I found my partitions, and the data on them
was ok.

After a few deep breaths, I rebooted into a second, clean win2k
installation that I keep on the same machine, different drive. From
there I can replace the mounted partitions as c:\program files etc,
while renaming the folders that Office setup made. Rebooted again into
my main win2k installation, to find everything was fine, clunkyness
gone, etc. Except obviously Office is not installed. Well, I say "not
installed", but of course the registry is full of references to it. So
I really need to uninstall somehow.

I'm now extremely nervous about using *anything* to do with the office
installer, but I figured that first of all, it won't be happy
uninstalling if it can't find the folders that it made. So, i could
copy them across into my mounted program files from the program files
that it created, then try uninstalling. However looking at the
registry, it's full of C:\Progra~1\Micros~1\Office entries. Of course
in my mounted version, Micros~1 is NOT "Microsoft Office", it's
actually Microsoft Frontpage. So I don't think the uninstall will work.
I suppose I could go through the registry searching for Micros~1 and
changing to to Micros~4, but that's not going to be fun.

Ok, boot back into my clean win2k version, rename my mounted partions
on c:, replace the "program files" and "documents and settings" that
the installer made. Copy the Administrator folder across from my
mounted version of docs & settings into "docs & settings" that the
installer made. Reboot, login as administrator, hmm, takes a long time.
Anyway, ran control panel, hmmm takes a long time. Ran Add/Remove
Programs to get the fantastic message "There are no programs installed
on this computer". <sigh>

My theory is that if I can get rid of the current **ck-up that is the
office installation, I should be able to install it by unmounting,
copying to real folder, installing, copying to mounted version,
remounting. But first I'm pretty sure I'll need to remove the current
mess.

Googling the groups shows that I'm not the only person this has
happened to. I have to ask, though:
1. WTF is the installer doing unmounting partitions?
2. What's with the 8.3 filenames?
3. Does anyone understand what I've just said or is it unintelligible? <<
--
Let us know if this helped you,

Bob Buckland ?:-)
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

For Everyday MS Office tips to "use right away" -
http://microsoft.com/events/series/administrativetipsandtricks.mspx




.

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