I have a problem with my pc and was hoping for some help. I currently cannot play two of my fave games as the cd wants to uninstall them before i can re-install them. The problem is that the games were on the second part of a partioned hard drive that is now a cd drive. I cannot re-install until i have first uninstalled and therefore cannot play the games. My pc registry doesn't read these files as existing but they must be somewhere because otherwise the game wouldn't think it was already installed. The options i see available are; clear the new hd and partition it (hopefully this would allow me to uninstall the files that no-longer exist) or clear both hard drives and re-install windows (hopefully clearing the problems away and starting again). Are there any less drastic options available?

My drives/drivers(?) used to be as follows:
a=floppy c=main hard drive d&e= smaller hd partitioned f=cd drive e=cd drive
(note- d&e were old and faulty and kept crashing the pc)
Now:
a=floppy c=main hard drive d=new hd (much larger that former partitioned hd) e=cd f=cd

[ 06-01-2004, 10:50 AM: Message edited by: Ironbar ]

Hmmm... have you tried searching the registry or the games' .ini file for the CD references? You might also check the shortcut's properties. It may be possible to just switch the info to reflect d: now instead of e:.

That's what I would try, at least... the data is out there... somewhere... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Good luck. And be sure to back up before trying this kind of stuff.

Registry, same as when you did this with Bg2. Sometimes, you can run the setup directly from the CD rather than the autorun program, and that might let you bypass the registry checks. That dosent work for all games however.

You delete the game without unistalling first?

Run registry editor and do a search on the game (by the name) and delete whatever entries you find. Exit the registry editor and reboot.

[ 06-01-2004, 11:20 AM: Message edited by: Paladin2000 ]

the easiest way of course is to format and reinstall everything if rather than going thru registry one by one in risking serious damage to your windows. than again, if you know what your doing then its ok. ;)

its not actually that easy Hark, you have to make backups of a heap of stuff first. Cant you just manually run the installers? That works with some games, just browse the CD and double click on setup.

I was unable to uninstall due to the condition of the old hard drive (20gb). It created a problem whereby it prevented windows from booting off the main hard drive. It meant that i was stuck in dos with no escape. My damaged hard drive was then disconected and everything worked fine. Upon installing a new hard drive i thought the problem would be over but it has continued. The only games that have been a problem are bg2 (+tob) and iwd (1&2). These games each wanted to be uninstalled first (impossible) but my other games didn't ask to be uninstalled and i was able to install them as usual.

I have used the setup method directly off the cd but that asks for the game to be uninstalled, when i let the cd autoplay it wants to play the game before realising the files don't exist.

I did the registry edit thing but that only recognises drives c & d, as e is now a cd drive. I was hoping that by partitioning d into d & e i would create the e registry and allow for a bizarre uninstalation to take place.

Thanks for the help so far, any other ideas?

What you'd be looking for in the registry is references to E:. You'd then change them to D:, and life may be good. Just go into regedit, search for E:, and see what happens.

Technically, if you used the registry editor to clean out the entries of the games, the OS will think that those games does not exist anymore; unless you left something behind in the registry.

Try and do it again and when you are done, you should note that BG2 (or which ever game in question) will not appear in the "add or remove program lists". If it is still there, you need to do it again and try using a different keyword to search for the game entries.

I will have another go in the morning. Thanks