? the Phantom Drive? Help!

[baptistteacher]

Our church computer has a problem.
While trying to retrieve a Corel WordPerfect document from a floppy, the doc type had been mysteriously changed to "lbs", and could not be opened. The document is for address labels, but had not been this doc type before.

She tried to un-install Corel so she could re-install it, but in the un-install the computer gave a message about something missing from "drive f" Is this the mysterious Fantom drive, as we have no "drive f" on this computer.

Running Windows 98, on a pentium 2 or 3.

 

[liafailrock]

Baptist Teacher:

From what I gather about your post here, you tried to retrieve a Corel file from a floppy in which the extension changed (I'm not too sure what is going on here). But, have you just tried saving it to the hard drive and change the extension to what it is supposed to be? There may be more to this, I'm not sure.

Then, you tried to uninstall and reinstall Corel just because of this one file. This seems a tad extreme to me. However, from what I hear you saying, it sounds like due to your 'fantom' drive problem that it would not let you uninstall it and that's where you are stuck (with Corel on the computer yet). I'd say at this point, try these two things for starters and let me know:

1. Change the extension like I suggested and see if that works... if not, then...
2. In "My Computer" (or windows explorer whatever you feel more confident in using) check the number of drives the computer thinks it has. This will not solve anything, but I'm curious and then get back to me--- it should just have your A: drive (floppy) C: drive and CD ROMS (e.g. D UNLESS you have your C: drive partitioned further. I'm not sure. Some people do, but mostly folks just have one primary, active partition for the hard drive.

 

[David Mark]

Yesterday I tried to run setup for Microsoft Office 2000.

Office was already installed and I was trying to add a feature.

Setup failed because it could not find files on the N:\ drive.

Well... there is not an N:\ drive and I've seen this before.

So I opened the registry, searched for all instances of the N:\ drive and deleted them. There may have been a dozen refrences.

As I was finding these instances in the registry, I noticed many of the entries referred to Corel also.

After I deleted the entries, setup worked fine.

!!WARNING!! Editing the registry can cause a machine to become unstable or worse. When you make changes in the registry you are not prompted to save changes. So you don't have a chance to reconsider.

I do this kind of thing almost every day at work and I've been doing stuff like this for almost 8 years professionally.

Dave.

 

[liafailrock]

Dave:

That was also good advice, I will admit that was a head-scratcher for me since we only have one computer with it on and rarely use it. Our friend should back up the registry first so that it can be replaced by importing it if the change was bad (e.g. in 'safe mode' boot-up)

(Do a 'RUN', type in 'regedit', then select 'registry' on the top, then export it to a safe folder somewhere--- make sure you are saving all in the export range radio button below)

 

[David Mark]

Thanks liafailrock,

You added something I was thinking of too, but did not mention.

You got me thinking back to my Windows 98 days.

If I am on the phone with a customer and I ask them to edit the registry , I might have them export the key first as you say. This is wise, because the original key can be imported later if something doesn't work.

In Windows 98 there are two files in the \windows folder that make up the total registry. They are:

SYSTEM.DAT
USER.DAT

It is easy to copy these files to a backup folder just in case something undesirable happens.
These two files are HIDDEN and READ-ONLY, so you will only be able to find them if you have "show all files and extensions" enabled.

Dave

 

[baptistteacher]

Thanks guys!

I wasn't at church when this happened, just reporting what the secretaries said.

Will see if I can try the changing the extension. That would have been my first suggestion if I had been there. - Just thought I would seek out some ideas also.

Being a Mac user, I am not quite as familiar with Windows, and this secretary struggles with her computer all the time.