Computer Question-Any Problems Transferring Office 97 From D Drive to C Drive

[kelticwizard]

I have an old Pentium 200 Hz, 32 Meg RAM, 20 Gig HD, Windows 97SE, Microsoft Office 95

Have come into possession of old 1 Gig Hard Drive, Windows 95, with Office 97. Plan to install this as D drive temporarily.

Am interested in transferring Office 97 from the temporary D hard drive to the C hard drive. Then remove the D hard drive and keep it for safekeeping, since I have no Office 97 disk. I want to keep the hard drive as a disk in case I have to reformat the C hard drive.

Actually, I am only interested in Excel 97, but figured I might as well transfer the rest of Office 97 onto my C drive along with it.

Can anyone foresee any reason I just cannot copy Office 97 from my temporary D hard drive to my C hard drive? Are there any complications with this?

The audio angle in this, (not that it is necessary in the Everything Else forum, but there is an audio angle), is that there are several useful Excel based programs on the FRD Consortium page that do not work with Excel 95. They might not work with Excel 97 either, but I since the HD with Office 97 was given to me by a customer, I figured I would take a shot with Excel 97.

FRD Consortium page with many useful programs is located at:
http://www.pvconsultants.com/audio/frdgroup.htm

[SkinnyBoy]

If you can run it from D, then you can copy it to C without any problems, hopefully, but you may find that it is looking for files that aren't there, adn you may have to search for them on D and copy them to the same location, but on C..

[Rory Christ]

You are probably out of luck. Most Windows programs, Office included, store settings in the Windows registry and install files to the Windows system directory that you will not be able to transfer from the old harddrive to the new. The only way to get these files installed and registered in the proper location is to use the installation program.

Rory

[SkinnyBoy]

You should be able to get it working, just may take abit of copying files.. so. .

[SkinnyBoy]

JUST TRY RUNNING IT FROM D FIRST.. If it is looking for files, copy them to where they should be, if you still can't get it to work, then forget about it. . If it works like this, then copy it to C..

[kelticwizard]

Thank you both for your swift replies.

Well, it wouldn't be any problem for me to run it from the D drive. The only hassle about that is that if something happens to the D drive, then my Office 97 goes with it. That is why I would like to have the D hard drive out of the computer and in storage for those occasions. If Office 97 runs those FRD Consortium programs, then if I lose Excel 97, I lose my ability to run those programs as well.

I'll follow Skinny Boy's advice-try to copy from the D hard drive and transfer any files it asks for. If it doesn't work, at least I have it on my D drive.



Question # 2.
Would it be a good idea to replace the Windows 95 on the D drive with Windows 98SE? I have the Windows 98SE CD. Would that make transferring files easier?



Question # 3.
I have another 1 gig hard drive. If I cannot transfer Office 97 to the C drive, can I wipe the second 1 Gig HD clean and then copy all of the D drive, (the one with Office 97), onto the second 1 Gig Hard Drive?

[SkinnyBoy]

No, first try running it from D... if it will run from D, then you can copy it to C knowing that it will still run..

[Rory Christ]

I believe SkinnyBoy is speaking outside his area of expertise. MS Office depends on a ton of data in the registry along with a number of COM components that need to be properly registered with the operating system.

Neither trying to run the program from the D drive nor copying files from one drive to another are going to get around these issues.

There is a freely available Excel viewer that you can download from MS, but you probably need more than the viewer for the spreadsheets you are interested in.

Another option may be to try OpenOffice.org. It is available for free and claims to be compatible with MS Office formats.

Rory

[kelticwizard]

Okay, so I won't get it on the the C drive. So I will run it on the D drive.

That leaves 2 questions.

A) Would it be better if get rid of Windows 95 on the D drive, (the one with Office 97), and install Windows 98SE instead? Or should I leave Windows 95 on the D drive and Windows 98SE on the C drive?

B) Can I take my third 1 Gig HD, reformat it , then simply copy the whole entire D drive, (the one with the Office 97) onto the clean, new I Gig Hard Drive? If I can do this, then I can have a spare copy of Office 95.

Thank you both for all your help so far.

[jleaman]

you cant copy office to d: your registery tells it is on c: at a certian location. it just wont work your going to haveto uninstall it and installl it to a folder called office on the d: that is the only way it will work on d:\office