CW install; Internal Error 2908

[imajeff]

Hi, isn't it my luck that the WaveForum 2007 is in progress but my CW 5.1 (HC08) did not seem to work for the course! It installed once, almost worked, then now I cannot install it at all!

I hope I can fix this Tuesday, since that's really the day that I need it.

1. First, I installed CW 4.5 (HCS12). Then they told us we only needed the other, CW 5.1, so I left it installed and installed also 5.1. I was following the demonstration, but come time to build the project, it said there was a code size limitation. That meant that the license.dat they had me copy in did not work.

2. They mentioned that they've had this sort of problem when they already had another version of CW installed (and I had 4.5), so I uninstalled everything. First 4.5, then 5.1. I even went to "Program Files" and deleted CodeWarrior stuff left over from the two installations. I had never had any other CW installed previously.

3. Perhaps I went to far (though I see no reason why this would hurt), but I opened 'regedit' and removed any CodeWarrior stuff from user and local_machine.

4. I tried to reinstall CW 5.1, after a few things, it said "Internal Error 2908", and then a huge complicated id in brackets {4ED....-...-.-.-.-...-.-..-.-..-.-....-...BE52C} which is of course meaningless to me (it has a new number for perhaps every file that it tries to install).

5. I tried countless ways to recover from this, but simply cannot install CW 5.1 anymore. I can still install CW 4.5, but I don't need that, and doing that again did not restore the ability to install 5.1.

Any help?  TIA

[CompilerGuru · Accepted solution]

When asking google for "Internal Error 2908"
I did find many places, so I guess this error is from the windows installer service and not CW specific.
For office 2000, Microsoft has those suggestions (not sure if they apply to CW too)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299777

I would also google for the GUID in your error message, try to copy the message content with Ctrl-C, usually that works for Windows error message.

manually deleting stuff out of the registry is always dangerous, I wonder what you did delete too much. Maybe some data structures used by the windows MSI installer stuff, I guess.

There are also some tools out to clean the registry from inconsistent data.

Daniel

[imajeff]

Thanks, that would confirm that the windows registry is messed up. Too bad I don't know a convenient way to "clean" my registry without installing complex utilities which gum up my computer even more. Any free ones that work?

[J2MEJediMaster]

Only free technique that I know of to clean a hosed Windows directory is to backup the drive, reformat it, and then add all of the stuff back from the backup. If you haven't made a comprehensive backup in a while, now is the time to take care of that while you're at it. This suggestion is not meant as a jest: backing up your data is *always* good (you're making your livelihood from it, right?), and it's the only way I've been able to reliably recover from a farbled Windows registry.

---Tom

[imajeff]

Tom, ya don't actually sound like you know what you're saying...
did you really mean "Windows directory"? I'm talking about the registry. All I need is to find what key(s) are causing a problem. No need to format the drive...

Mind you, I agree with you completely about backups. I had wished I happened to have a backup *just* before installing CW, and maybe *just* after, and maybe *just* before uninstalling, and maybe... which brings me to the point: We just never seem to get that backup at *just* the right time, do we? I certainly don't want to roll back to a regestry that is so old loses sync with what still should be installed.

Message Edited by imajeff on 2007-03-2106:04 PM

[J2MEJediMaster]

No, actually I meant Windows Registry. I mistyped in my last message, sorry. You wipe the drive out, and then let Windows rebuild the registry as you copy stuff from the backup onto the hard drive. I went spelunking into the Windows Registry one day to fix something and that was the only way to fix my ham-handed attempt. I've since talked to some Windows people about this, and the consensus was that if you've corrupted the Windows registry badly, reformat and restore was the only viable option. If I've heard wrong, I'd be glad to be told different. And like imajeff, if there were some free or shareware tools to undo the registry damage out there, I'd love to hear about them...

Message Edited by J2MEJediMaster on 2007-03-22 10:16 AM

[imajeff]

Yes, you are right that if I corrupted my registry bad enough, I would have to rebuild the registry completely (i.e. re-install Win). And of course if I don't do a "clean" install by erasing the entire corrupted configuration, then Windows installer would read in and preserve the corrupt information. What I am questioning is how I could have corrupted it "that bad".

All I did was uninstall the application, then deleted the keys in the registry that I know were added by that installation. And AFAIK they were only used by CodeWarrior. So it is not that I have done something not easy to recover from. It is most likely that Microsoft has _designed_ it to not work that way. YASDM (Yet Another Stupid Decision by Microsoft)

You can probably tell my feelings toward the Microsoft approach. I have abandoned MS as much as possible for my own uses (shortly after Win XP was released). I'm GNU/Linux mostly. Still, I've been employed constantly by many people, ever since, solving their MS problems for them. So I'm not completely out of the "know-how" loop.

The key is the key. It helps a lot to know what each key does, and especially remember to export keys to a text file before large changes like deleting it (of course I forgot).