Help System Needs Help
Fred, The information you provided for "How To Safely Add Or Replace A Hard Drive" with photo illustrations ( http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;?articleID=181502411 ) is what I needed when I replaced my first hard drive. The Disk Management Tool is, indeed, a jewel - I use it for changing drive letters for my DVD-ROMs so they can retain their identity when I use a Media Card reader or USB drives. However I needed more hand-holding when I partitioned my hard drives - I used Partition Magic 8.
I got lost with the drive imaging in your setup because I have not used that as yet. But I do have Acronis True Image 8. You have inspired me to install it and begin using it. It would be nice to start today, but my computer is not "perfect" at the moment. When I installed MS Streets and Trips 2006 early last month, I tried to use the Help in setting up our new GPS. The Help file seemed to be corrupted. I then needed to check the Help for MS Word. It too was corrupted. This prompted me to check some more of my applications and found that a large number of them present me with the same error messages. The Help File for Eudora 7 is NOT corrupted and neither is the one for MS Works, but Quicken, QuickBooks Pro, Roxio's CD Creator, and several others, are. I am enclosing a couple of screen shots of the error messages I got.
System Restore only gave me 2 choices, but did not correct this, and SR would not allow me to go back to the previous month. There has been nothing helpful from Google searches for "corrupted Help files". The one described for MS Word was no use whatsoever. If you could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. If I need to reinstall WinXP to restore my Help files I can do that, but I would first like some reassurance that it would solve my problem, knowing I would have to also reinstall my other software. The only software installed on my C drive is the OS and those things that would not allow me to choose the destination. The other applications are on any one of my 8 partitions.
Your Newsletter was the first one I subscribed to in early 1998, and I have used many of your tips. Thanks for the past 7 years. ---Nanette Gordon
Although it's great to image a "perfect" setup so you'll have that as a fallback in case of disaster, it still a good idea to make images or other backups even if the system isn't perfect, so you can at least get everything else back. Any image or standard backup is better than none, even if it's imperfect; so it's worth doing, no matter what.
As for helpfiles, yes, they can sometimes get munged, just like any other file. But if your system reports many help files as corrupted, it may be the help system itself that's a problem. You see, help files are just html/text or compressed html/text; they're pure content. Your OS's help system opens, displays, and manipulates that content when you call on the help file. This is analogous to your word processor and the documents you create with it: The documents stand alone--- just as the help files do--- but the word processor software (like the help file system) actually opens the documents to let you work with them.
If the actual help file itself--- the content--- is what's
munged, then the usual technique is to find the offending file and delete or
rename it; and then reinstall/repair the software whose file it was, so a new
helpfile will get copied to your hard drive. Microsoft has detailed instructions
for repairing the Helpfile in an Office app, for example, but the same general
technique should work for other software as well:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=260200
If it's the help system that's messed up (and I suspect that's the case with yours, Nanette), the "Help - Diagnostics" page at http://helpware.net/htmlhelp/hh_diags.htm offers a free download that can perform a basic test of your OS's help system to make sure the pieces are in place. Other tools, both general and specific, are available at http://helpware.net/downloads/index.htm
(And: wow--- this newsletter started in 1997, so you were onboard early, Nanette! Thanks for reading!)
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