C
Charlie Tame
Hopefully this might save some of you a bit of time deciding what to do.
Over the last couple of months I have installed W2k and XP Pro together with
MS Office, Visio and OneNote for evaluation on 3 machines.
Last week I went to office update from within Access (first time of use) and
the three updates offered downloaded but failed to install. Following
suggestions on the site I tried one at a time with no success until the
selected update was the French Grammar checker. By this time I was going
directly to the update site, not using program links. Once the Grammar
checker had installed the other two did also.
On the second machine I went directly to the update site and all 3 installed
first time no problem.
On the third machine I checked while using Access and all 3 failed, so I
tried the one update at a time process again but it did not work. I also
noted that the 3 items did download, the failure was always in the install
part. So that was two failures using the link from Access and one success
going direct.
I searched the update newsgroup for suggestions and thanks to Ben found
quite a few ideas, but none worked. I probably spent 2 or 3 hours working
though them all. Bear in mind these are all pretty clean from new
installs...
There were no helpful (or unhelpful) error messages except the update site's
failure to install.
From Ben's hints I noted that occasionally, relabelling disk drives in
program manager can cause trouble, and the one thing that singles the third
machine out from the others is the recent failure (since the MS Office
install) of a drive that was used only for a second backup (it's basically a
test machine) and really wasn't needed. When it failed I simply took it out.
Now, I wasn't asked for CDs and I did try the long versions of the files,
and I did leave the temp files intact when I installed Office, but NONE of
it went anywhere near the suspect drive during the install and I saw no
references to missing files anywhere except in the install logs... however
NONE of those references were to the missing drive, only to drives that were
still intact.
By office standards I am a total novice, but the one good thing in all this
is that the uninstall and reinstall of Office caused me no data loss at all
(I had backups anyway but did not need them) however it did NOT fix Visio or
OneNote, I had to remove and reinstall all of them to restore proper
function. Again no noticeable losses but then I hadn't used either of them
for anything serious so can't be sure. Of course for a regular user with all
kinds of templates and stuff in use I suspect the results could be far
worse.
So can I throw this open to the update regulars for ideas, it seems to be a
potentially serious problem when moving a dead drive can force a reinstall
of software that's not remotely connected with it. Seems to me that one of
the suggestions already here should have worked but nothing did. By the way
I DID follow the rules, nothing else running, no AV or other stuff to
interfere, and this doesn't explain the first machine's download problem but
that wasn't fatal either.
Charlie
Over the last couple of months I have installed W2k and XP Pro together with
MS Office, Visio and OneNote for evaluation on 3 machines.
Last week I went to office update from within Access (first time of use) and
the three updates offered downloaded but failed to install. Following
suggestions on the site I tried one at a time with no success until the
selected update was the French Grammar checker. By this time I was going
directly to the update site, not using program links. Once the Grammar
checker had installed the other two did also.
On the second machine I went directly to the update site and all 3 installed
first time no problem.
On the third machine I checked while using Access and all 3 failed, so I
tried the one update at a time process again but it did not work. I also
noted that the 3 items did download, the failure was always in the install
part. So that was two failures using the link from Access and one success
going direct.
I searched the update newsgroup for suggestions and thanks to Ben found
quite a few ideas, but none worked. I probably spent 2 or 3 hours working
though them all. Bear in mind these are all pretty clean from new
installs...
There were no helpful (or unhelpful) error messages except the update site's
failure to install.
From Ben's hints I noted that occasionally, relabelling disk drives in
program manager can cause trouble, and the one thing that singles the third
machine out from the others is the recent failure (since the MS Office
install) of a drive that was used only for a second backup (it's basically a
test machine) and really wasn't needed. When it failed I simply took it out.
Now, I wasn't asked for CDs and I did try the long versions of the files,
and I did leave the temp files intact when I installed Office, but NONE of
it went anywhere near the suspect drive during the install and I saw no
references to missing files anywhere except in the install logs... however
NONE of those references were to the missing drive, only to drives that were
still intact.
By office standards I am a total novice, but the one good thing in all this
is that the uninstall and reinstall of Office caused me no data loss at all
(I had backups anyway but did not need them) however it did NOT fix Visio or
OneNote, I had to remove and reinstall all of them to restore proper
function. Again no noticeable losses but then I hadn't used either of them
for anything serious so can't be sure. Of course for a regular user with all
kinds of templates and stuff in use I suspect the results could be far
worse.
So can I throw this open to the update regulars for ideas, it seems to be a
potentially serious problem when moving a dead drive can force a reinstall
of software that's not remotely connected with it. Seems to me that one of
the suggestions already here should have worked but nothing did. By the way
I DID follow the rules, nothing else running, no AV or other stuff to
interfere, and this doesn't explain the first machine's download problem but
that wasn't fatal either.
Charlie