New hard drive

[Guest]

I installed a new hard drive and copied my files fro mmy
old one to this new one. Now with the new boot drive all
programs are working fine except for my office products.
So I tried reinstalling them and when insert the CD rom
and click on the set up icon I get the following
error, "This patch package could not be opened. Verify
that the patch package exists and tha tyou can access it,
or contact the patch application vendor to verify that
this is a valid windows installer patch package."

I am running Windows XP Home Edition.

 

[Brian]

I installed a new hard drive and copied my files fro mmy
old one to this new one. Now with the new boot drive all
programs are working fine except for my office products.
So I tried reinstalling them and when insert the CD rom
and click on the set up icon I get the following
error, "This patch package could not be opened. Verify
that the patch package exists and tha tyou can access it,
or contact the patch application vendor to verify that
this is a valid windows installer patch package."

I am running Windows XP Home Edition.

This seems to be due to the fact that the installer links in the registry
have been corrupted, perhaps due to the fact that you have copied files
rather than cloning the disk.
The essence of the problem is probably that the registry still has the
installer entries for all of the Office XP files that you originally
installed. What you need to do is delete the first of those registry items
to fool the system into thinking that Office XP is not installed. When you
then install it again, it should keep all of the original settings.

Click Start/Run then type Regedit and click OK.

1) Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products and locate the product name
(in the right hand panel) There is an entry for every product called
ProductName.
2) Rename the product id key (the long string of numbers in the left-hand
panel) to something starting with an underscore (in case anything goes wrong
and you need to reinstate it).
3) Reinstall the product and download/install the updates.

There should be no need to reboot the PC.

Brian