Help with MS Office Update problem

[rVidia]

Has anyone had any trouble installing updates for Microsoft Office? Every time I attempt to install security updates for Word and Excel, they fail to install. I have Microsoft Office Basic Edition, although I did a Custom install (didn't install Outlook, just Word and Excel). Could this be the problem? I always uncheck Outlook updates before installing the others. Any suggestions?

[Dan18960]

Office always wants the CD before applying the updates - do you have the cd's available?

I have gone to making a folder on the hard drive (ie Office 2003) and making Disk 1 and Disk 2 under there and copying / pasting the cd's into each Diak n as appropriate and doing the install from there.

[rVidia]

Still not working for me. Any further suggestions?

[rVidia]

I think I may have found a problem!

I use Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 for partition management. I have four partitions on my machine, one for Windows, one for programs, one for docs, and another for page file. Here comes the problem. I decided to open up Word (2003) and went to Help > Detect and Repair; I did this just to see the result. To my surprise, I get an error: Error 1327. Invalid Drive I:\ so detect and repair failed. Office is installed on H: (where I keep docs, program profiles, etc.), yet it was reading it as I:\ (I do not have an I: partition).

To back up a bit, this happened to me with my programs partition before - things weren't working correctly, as it was reading the partition as a different letter than it was. So I was able to clear that up; I ran Acronis DD and changed the letter to that which the program was reading the partition as; however, in my current situation, this didn't work. I've changed the drive letter for H: several times now to I:, and on reboot, everything runs smoothly and I get an Acronis Disk Director Complete on second reboot. However, the drive letter is not changing but is remaining as H:

I'm guessing if I can rename the partition to I: the repair job will work; I'm not sure if that will solve my update problem, but it may just do the trick. Any suggestions as to how I can resolve this Acronis problem? :confused: I've never run into Acronis problems before. Help is appreciated...

[Dan18960]

Well I am NOT one to partition a single drive - I tend to put in additional drives.

BUT what I had yesterday was a user purchased a new printer, a zip drive, and was having problems accessing their F:\ (by the way - NEVER use F:\ for the first network drive allocation - I go out to J:\)!

I asked IF the printer had any photo card reader slots on it - that was ONE. I asked if any EXTERNAL storage was connected or had been conntected - that was TWO! What happened is the system ASSIGNED physical hardware drive allocations BEFORE assigning logical ones.

So I had the user disconnect the external storage device - and they were able to get to their F:\ on the network with no problems. I then had them connect the external device and F:\ was immediately assigned to that LOCAL hardware device and dis-engaged the network F:\ assignment.

We went in to Disk Management and found the external device and changed the drive letter assigned by XP to one out of the range of the network assignments (we used R:\ - removable LOL) and then the F:\ network drive was acquired and everyone (including me since the client is a 70 mile drive ONE way) happy.

You might want to give that a shot.

[rVidia]

Dan:

Thanks for the help, although that didn't seem to work. No printer attached to the computer. Here are the other drives:

C: - Windows
G: - Programs
H: - Docs/profiles
Z: - Page file

A: - Floppy
E: - DVD
F: - CD-RW

When I insert a flash drive, it's drive D:

I have done a lot of partitioning, so along the way I probably changed some drive letters; perhaps the old ones may have "stuck" :eek: Unfortunately, the log files don't show exactly what partition was assigned what letter. I can't recall what letter I assigned to the programs partition that I had to change; it may have also been I: but there's no way to know.

[rVidia]

Problem resolved. Instead of trying to change the drive letter with Acronis DD, I just went straight to Disk Management. Fortunately that worked, and I'm now able to install updates (I took your advice and copied installation files to the HDD), although I'm still not sure why Acronis was causing problems...maybe I should just let it go and hope there won't be any other issues in the future. Thanks for the help, Dan.

EDIT: I think there may just be problems with Acronis Disk Director in general. For instance, other than not allowing me to change drive letter, it is preventing me from creating a new partition (for backups; I ended up just creating a folder for that purpose in another partition), reporting there is not enough free space on the drive. The alert comes up on every partition, even though I have more than enough free space on each drive. Not sure why there are problems. Think the best solution would be an (Acronis) re-install? --> http://www.kickenhardware.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3014