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Newbie challenges the veterans!

I

imported_Dignan17

Junior Member
Hello all, I look forward to purusing these boards. For the moment, I'd like to test your wits and knowledge with a head scratcher.

I'm installing Office 2003 on a laptop here at work (it's an office, they have to have MS stuff). So, I put in the CD and run the setup. I get the installation window just fine. It's running through the files that are being extracted and transfered for the installation. Fine. Normal.

BUT! When it advances to the very next screen, where you're supposed to enter the oh so crucial product key...freeze. Crash. Not the system, just the window. The window is unresponsive to every command I throw at it. It simply freezes for around 20 seconds then the thing closes. No error message no nothing.

We know it is not the disc. The disc works fine on every other computer we try it on. Just this laptop. All the computers in the office are running Win2K Pro.

I can't tell you how much this newbie would appreciate some help on this. Thanks.
 
Feeble newbie, feel the wrath of... of... oh heck, I can't think of anything dramatic right now 😱 Is there anything revealing in the computer's Event Viewer logs that corresponds to the installation attempts? The account you're logged on with has at least Power User privileges so it can install software?

Good luck and welcome to the Forums 🙂
 
Thanks!!

Sadly, this lowly newbie does not know of these highly advanced "Event Viewer" logs that you speak of. I can tell you that the user does indeed have all the necessary permissions. He's the CIO of our department 🙂 That also means I can't really rush into his office going "Oooo, oooo, I thought of something else!" 🙂 So, I thank you for your help, but I regret to say that I'll need to take in as many suggestions as possible before I go in, try them out, then report back here. I hope you understand my position 🙂

So thanks for the help, oh great veteran one. The humble newbie...humbles himself further 🙂

*edit*
and by the way, that's a slick icon they give to newbies. is that the same for everyone, or did I just happen to get that? 🙂
 
You can pick any of the icons, just hit Profile up at the top and there you go. I think that's just alphabetically the first one on the list. Event Viewer, go to Control Panel > Performance & Maintenance > Administrative Tools and it'll be in there, with three categories of logs.

It is possible that your CIO has a user account that lacks the necessary privilege level to install software. I'm one of the IT personnel where I work, but I use a Restricted User account as my daily-driver account, and would not be able to install Office with that account either. Try logging onto the lappie as its local Administrator or as a Domain Administrator of the domain it's part of (if it is a member of a domain).
 
Okay, so I've looked at the machine some more.

Under any account, including the super secret admin account, the same thing happens with every installation attempt.

I found the event viewer (I did some research on it to know how to use it, thanks for mentioning it). The error it listed at the time of each installation failure was a disc error, and it said there was a bad block.

We're running disk cleanup right now, and possibly scandisk later. Any other suggestions?
 
Are these computers networked? I am assuming they are. You could put the cd in another computer, and share the CD-ROM, and try installing it through the network, since none of the other computers seem to have a problem reading the disc.
 
Thanks for the reply.

Yes, these computers are all networked. However, we've tried installing from a mapped CDROM elsewhere and we got the exact same problem. We also tried installing from this disk on other machines while loaded into a mapped drive, but they all worked. It really doesn't look like it's the CD.
 
Have you run Chkdsk on the hard drive? Sure there is enough free space? Have you tried installing anything else on the problem computer?
 
I'm trying checkdisk right now. There is 7GB free, so I don't think that's it. Apparently it is possible to install other things to this machine.

Here, however, is the word straight from the Event Viewer's mouth:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7
Date: 11/24/2004
Time: 12:14:18 PM
User: N/A
Computer: BXRHW11
Description:
The device, \Device\Harddisk0\DR0, has a bad block.
Data:
0000: 03 00 22 00 01 00 72 00 .."...r.
0008: 00 00 00 00 07 00 04 c0 .......À
0010: 00 01 00 00 9c 00 00 c0 ....?..À
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0020: 00 ea db b5 02 00 00 00 .êÛµ....
0028: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0030: 00 00 00 00 28 00 00 00 ....(...
0038: 02 84 00 00 00 00 03 00 .?......
0040: 28 00 01 5a ed f5 00 00 (..Zíõ..
0048: 40 00 @.
 
What brand is the hard drive? I would run the manufacturers diagnostic program on the drive, and also run memtest, as memory errors could also cause read/write failures.
 
Just a few things to try! It sounds to me like there is an address problem, have you scanned the registry there may be an entry that is stoping the install from a previous package. Also try, if there is, removing the ram and just using 1 of the modules and switch them incase there is a corrupt mem location within the module. Can you tell me if you are upgrading or is it a fresh install. Also do you have partitions on the drive and is it FAT 32 or NTSC. What is the state of your VM. You need to run a diagnostic on the drive first and formost followed by memory diagnostic that is where the problem will be. Also run a scan of the Install CD as it is poss there is a prob with that. i have had CD's that work on all machines but for one sometimes thats the way it is. What OS are you using and what is the spec of your notebook
 
Are you running Norton as there are issues with this when installing Software, well from my exp that is. Try closing it down check in Task Mgr that all is shut down Are you using XP Pro SP2 also there are other things to consider like( old or out-of-date firmware)

run fsck (file system check).

run chkdsk /r /f

Most Important BackUp all your DATA ...I lost 6 years work most of my Music from the early days of my Production I have copies on Vinyl and CD but all the mixesand track seperation has gone forever. My own fault of course.

Good Luck
 
Well, congrats and thanks to stevty2889 for being the first to suggest CHKDSK. Apparently there was a single bad sector or block, which was fixed, and the installation was instantly possible. Huzzah! Thanks again for all the help, folks. I REALLY appreciate it.
 
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