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[ Installations Plus+ PC Forum ] [ Archive 061298 ]

Posted by: Richard Jones on December 28, 1999 at 03:56:17
Homepage: Personal Page, Richard T. Jones
In Reply to: Re: Cannot re-install "hp faxphone" posted by Raphael K. Hickenbick on August 15, 1999 at 17:47:41

Subject: Re: Cannot re-install "hp faxphone"

I have a Pavilion 7270 and I ran into the same problem trying to reinstall
HP FaxPhone. I downloaded v2.3 from the hp web site, ran the setup and got
the annoying "Error Setup" message you were referring to. I am not sure
at what point or why the "RZS Fax" printer device stopped working for me,
but I have added several new pieces of hardware since I tried it last. The
tip about left-over Faxphone files from a previous installation did not turn
out to be very helpful, so I poked around in the setup files and several hours
later... Here is the explanation and a work-around.

The problem:
The first thing the install script does is it checks the bios version on
your computer. At least this is what I guess is being done by the call
to entry point CheckHPBios() in HPMODELD.DLL from mmc.mst, which is where
the install presently gives up. If you are like me, you have had your bios
updated since you bought the computer, so it is no surprise that it fails.

The work-around:
The call to CheckHPBios() only takes place if a variable HPVERSION$ is set
to "USA". That assignment appears in the file "options.inc" which comes
out of the archive in the LZcompressed file "option.in_". These old-style
compressed files cannot be edited directly, so you have to be somewhat
clever. When the setup.exe first runs, it copies a few files to a scratch
folder named c:\~mmstfqf.t (don't ask) and does its work there. Here are
the steps I used to successfully bypass the CheckHPBios call:

1) Extract the archive with the -d option: faxphn23.exe -d
into an empty directory somewhere.
2) Go into the Disk1 folder and execute "setup.exe"
3) After a splash screen, you are prompted for the destination
directories. Do not answer. Instead, press ctrl-escape to bring up
the task bar and start the explorer. Navigate to the c:\~mmstfqf.t
folder and open the file "Options.inc" in Notepad (or your favorite
text editor) find the line that says CONST HPVERSION$ = "USA" and
change the "USA" to "The Cayman Islands". Exit from the editor
saving the changes
4) From the explorer, find the file you just edited and modify its
properties to make it read-only. This prevents it from being deleted
in the next step.
5) Go back to the Setup dialog box and select "Exit" "Exit" "OK" until
it goes away. You should see that c:\~mmstfqf.t still exists and
contains only the one file you edited.
6) Now find the folder from which you ran setup.exe and find the file
"setup.lst" nearby. Open it in Notepad and find the line under the
[FILES] section where Options.inc is being unpacked. Delete that line
and save setup.lst back where it was.
7) Run setup.exe and now it should behave itself.


In the end you will need to clean up the leftover c:\~mmstfqf.t folder.

Richard Jones


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