windows installer loop

[shortfatandugly]

I have a problem with a windows installer loop. This occurs when I open windows explorer and select the "search" option. Windows intaller pops up and claims that a mssing feature from MS SBE Office CD is required. Insertion of the CD does not resolve the problem. The operating systems claims the new component is installed abd then goes back into windows installer. Any help is appreciated.

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried either repairing the office installation or uninstalling/reinstalling it?

 

[shortfatandugly]

Yes, I have attempted both the reinstallation and the repair of Office. Neither resolved the windows installer loop. This windows installer loop occurs in all userids except the original administrator userid. Granting administrator authority to the other userids does not resolve problem either.

 

[MstrGone]

is office fully updated (sr1a & sp3)?

i found this link which sounds like it may be pertinient, says error may be due to prob w/ permissions - would explain the search working for admin, but noone else...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;274696

- Tim S.
A+, Net + certified
MCSA in training

 

[Oldefoxx]

I am getting into a murky area here, because several evolutional changes to windows and how applications are installed seem to be involved. One is the inclusion of the Windows Installer program, which seems to audit software that is added to the system, and takes part in determining if it is installed or not installed. The other is the inclusion of a hidden or d: drive partition which includes vender-installed software that is suppose to be on tap to "fix" any discrepancies that occur to that software. And of course the latter relates to the Recovery disks that come with new systems, so that venders no longer have to ship a complete set of CDs in case you have any problems.

If you install your own system, or attempt to reinstall your system, or possibly restore your system from a backup, you may find that some applications will report that the applications is installed (and often useable), but you get a message saying that it is not installed when you try to upgrade, repair or modify it. And you will also get the not installed message when you try to uninstall it.

Congratualtions, you are at war with the Windows Installer, as the auditing has somehow gotten out of sync with the actual state of the application. I haven't found a way to fix this directly. One vender suggested reinstalling a Demo version of thier software, then trying to install the purchase product over that. That might work for their software, but many venders do not provide demo versions or their software does not get the same result.

One useful tool comes from

http://www.microsoft.com,

and is called the Windows Installer Cleanup. It gives you the power to manually delete some or all of the audit keys that Windows Installer has set up. After using this program, some of the applications may have to be reinstalled. Others will work, update, and uninstall without further problems. But as useful as this tool is, it does not always resolve the problem.

For one thing, software venders may themselves search for keys, possibly in the Registry, to indicate if the program is currently installed or not. So using Windows Installer Cleanup may be only part of the solution. In some cases, deleting or renaming the primary directory and deleting all the associated Registry keys may be required. However, you can seriously mess up your current Windows installation, possibly rendering your PC unbootable, so it is important to export all your registry settings first before making any changes, and be very cautions with the changes you make. And I have one application that still persisted in its misguided status determination after all this effort. So I imported the Registry keys, renamed the primary directory to its old name, and looked for another cure.

What I eventually found was that setting up another drive partition on my system, installing another copy of the same operating system, then installing the same software that was giving me problems under the old operating system under that new system gave me a clean copy to work from. At that point I could do two things: (1) Export Registry keys for the application from the new system for import under the old system, and (2) Directly copy the primary directory from the new system over the same primary directory under the old system. You probably know that most applications install themselves under the c:\program files\ directory tree, but you may have to use Start/Search or Start/Find to locate some reference file, or look at the Search/Programs/ program tree and check the Properties of a program to find out where it is situated on the drive - many programs install themselves under a parent directory that is named for the software company itself.

Using the copy-over technique has been effective in fixing a number of problems. Copying the primary directory out to another place on the hard drive and changing the path in the shortcut links has also proved to fix one problem. Over time, disk errors can result in files or directories being lost or corrupted, and refreshing your installed software may be necessary. Having installation CDs available is highly recommended, as well as doing frequent backups. I have decided to keep the second system install on my computer, because it give me an alternate way to boot my system, it gives me an alternate way to verify that the software works, and it gives me a mechanism for keeping my primary system healthy through export/import of keys and the direct copy-over of files or directories that suddenly have problems.

I favor PowerQuest's products of Drive Image and PartitionMagic, for doing backups and restores, and for making changes to my hard drive partitions. But there are other excellent products out there that would do as well. The idea is that if you break your large hard drive up into multiple partitions, you get several important benefits:

(1) The cluster sizes per drive are smaller, meaning you have more efficient storage of files on your system

(2) Backing up of your active drive is usually all that is really necessary. Inactive files can be move to alternate drives, and only backed up occasionally. That makes for smaller and faster backups (and fewer media disks required).

(3) Since you are probably not using near the capacity of your hard drive, setting up one or more partitions that are as large as your active drive can be extremely useful:

(a) Drive Image will let you backup one drive into another. If you tell it to set a maximum size for a given media type (CD-Rs, CD-R/Ws, Jaz, Zip), you can prestage a removable media backup, then use other software to copy this image set off to the media device in question (you also have the images still on your hard drive for additional backups or in case of a necessary restore).

(b) PartitonMagic allows you to copy any drive into another, which is another way to preserve an image of your active drive.

(c) As indicated above, a separate system install could provide benefits for maintaining your active system. But it also means you could have alternative systems installed, and PartitionMagic means you can move, copy, resize, convert, add, and delete partitions without losing the contents of those drives (except for any partitons you delete or reformat).

Note that if you have Win9dx/ME, installing your software on a second drive may not seem like an option. That software wants to reside on the C: drive, which is always the first DOS-compatable primary drive found on the hard drive. But PartitionMagic gives you some control over the arrangement of partitions on your hard drive, and how they are designated. So by hiding and unhiding partions, converting them from primary to logical and back, changing their type, or changing their order, you can control what drive letters are associated with which partitions and which ones can even be seen from a DOS or Windows environment.

If you are going to get involved in partitioning your hard drive, here are a few points of advice:

(1) Since DOS and Windows only recognize DOS-compatable partitions (and DOS/Win9X/ME do not recognize NTFS partions used by Windows NT/XP), drive letters will not always be the same under different operating systems. While confusing, this offers some important advantages, which will be covered shortly.

Linux can recognize all partitons, so you usually need to make the first primary partition a Linux one, if you intend to install that as an optional system. Linux will then allow you to reboot to any alternative system - if it has control of the Master Boot Record.

DOS/Windows, by defualt, "own" the Master Boot Record (MBR), and will only let you boot to a DOS or Windows Environment. As the boot process looks for the first partition that is classified as a DOS/Windows one, it will ignore the first partition if it is a Linux one. So the second partition is a good choice for a FAT (FAT16, FAT32, FAT32X, VFAT) or NTFS partiton. It would only be an NTFS if you are starting up with Win NT or XP.

Linux works best if you provide a SWAP partition. Most people set this up as another primary partition. However, I have also found that Linux will recognize the swap drive it is configured as a logical partition, so keep this in mind as we talk about that next.

DOS/Windows only recognizes four parimary partitions per hard drive. A need to have a way to circumvent this limiation was achieved by coming up with a means of splitting one primary partion into any number of logical ones. This was referred to as an extended partition. The Extended partition does not get its own drive letter - instead, the driver software resolves drive letters to refer to one of the other primary partitions/hard drives, or to a logical drive within the extended partition. So at this point, you would construct the extended partition, which would likely extend through the rest of the hard drive.

Logical drives are then created and sized within the extended partition. A bootable primary partition has to reside within the first 1024 (0-1023) cylinders of the hard drive, which is due to limitations of the default track-sector addressing scheme of the Boot process. This means that the Linux partition cannot be super-huge, so that both it and the first DOS/Windows partition can start within this limitation. Fortunately, Linux is so small and efficient that this is not really an issue if arranged in this order.

Boot Managers exceed this limination, and if fact remove the limitation that a bootable partition has to be a primary partition. This means other operating systems can be set up on the logical partitions if desired. A Boot Manager takes over the MBR, and really helps to extend the options available to experimenters.

OS/2 provides its own Boot Manager (as does Linux), meaning that it sets the MBR to point where it wants/ I had some experience with OS/2 configurations, and it still required that a primary partition be the target of an install process. Experimentation showed that it could be the forth primary partition, behind the extended one, which meant that the Linux Swap partition had to be a logical one. So here are three viable alternative arrangements of your hard drive:

Linux Primary-DOS Primary-Extended Primary-Logical Drives

Linux Primary-DOS Primary-Linux Swap Primary-Extended Primary-Logical Drives

Linux Primary-DOS Primary-Extended Primary-Linux Swap Logical-other Logical Drives

And of course, an OS/2 Primary if desired. The Linux partitions are not required, but only included as an option.
Creating the necessary partions types and order before trying to install Linux is beneficial because it prevents Linux from making some wrong assumptions about where things go. Of course if you already have Linux installed, you can still reorder things with PartitionMagic or other suitable software.

Now some venders provide a different arrangement. For instance, this one:

Extended Partition-Logical (DDrive-Primary (C Drive,

When Linux was installed, it became:

Linux Primary-Linux Swap-Extended-Logical (D Drive-Primary (C Drive.

This arrangement counts on the fact that DOS/Windows always scans for all primary partitions on all drives and assignes drive letters accordingly, then rescans for all logical drives and assigns letters. Linux just does it in the order in which they appear. So in this case, the boot process will recognize the C: drive first, even though the D: drive appears before it.

Aside from being a bit confusing, this arrangement is very restrictive. You have to be aware of the first 1024 cylinder rule here. If you enlarge the extended partiton too much, you will push the C: partition out beyond the first 1024 cylinders, rendering the C: drive no longer bootable. In fact. this system could not then be made bootable because of the absence of a primary partition (aside from the extended one) in the first 1024 cylinders. And it also means that you could not mirgrate this hard drive's contents to a larger drive and take advantage of the added apsce for creating or extending logical drives - the only expansion possible would be to increase the size of the C: drive.

Moving Extended partitions is difficult, even for PartitionMagic. You cannot have more than one extended partition, you cannot move an extended partition if it has any logical drives in it, and you cannot have more than four primary partitions. To deal with this problem, I had the system move the D: Drive behind the C: Drive, which automatically created it as a 4th primary partition. The Swap partition was then moved behind that. The Extended partition was then deleted. The C: drive was then moved down the hard drive to sit behind the Linux partiton. The D: drive was converted back to a logical drive, which automatically created the extended partition to hold it. The Swap partition was then moved again to sit behind the C: Drive. The extended partition was then extended to run down behind the Swap Partiton. The Swap partition was then converted to a Logical drive. This automatically extended the extended partition to include it. The D: drive was then moved down to reside behind the Swap partition. The extended partiton was then resized to include the rest of the hard drive. Additional Logical Drives were created and formatted to fill the extended partition. Although PartitonMagic allows you to designate multiple steps to follow, then allows you to apply them in a series of operations, it can get confused as to what the current drive status will be when the next operation is attempted, and may bomb with an error. Just start in again with what you want it to do next, or try to avoid such errors by attempting fewer operations at a time.

Othera, more serious errors can occur. You may get an out of memory error, or it may seize up when attempting a multiple step operation that involves building a new partition, copying the data, resizing the partition, and changing the structure, all at the same time. If this happens, you may be force to reboot. When you get back into PartitionMagic, you may see an unfinished partiton of a unique type that PartitionMagic was in the midst of constructing. You can safely delete this partition and attempt the operation again. If it fails multiple times, you might want to figure out a way to do the same thing by a different means (for instance, attempt one of the four steps independently so that the complexity of the combined operation has been reduced). As long as the old partition and the new partition do not overlap, you should be able to recover from an occasional problem or setback.

This is a lot more than I wanted to say, but I don't want to send you off in a direction without some idea of the pitfalls and solutions you may find along the way.