EPs won't Install - UPDATE: Solved! Thanks, guys!

[thiafy]

I'm having the problem described here (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=211306), but the links posted there are broken, as far as I can tell, and everyone answering on this problem seems to be linking to those pages. Could anyone redirect me, or tell me what was on those help pages...?

My problem is specifically with Pets and Seasons, if that's important. Any pertinent advice is much appreciated -- I don't mind reinstalling, but I'd rather not do that unless I know it's going to work, and I'm having trouble getting a grip of what the problem actually is.

[simsample]

Information about manual install is in this article:
http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Install

Cleaning the disc often helps, too. :)

[thiafy]

Thank you for the advice. :) I should've thought of that myself: sometimes the obvious advice is the most useful. The discs now... sort of... run just fine; cleaning did the trick with Seasons, at least. Turns out my problem is a little weirder than even I thought, though.

So, erm. It looks like both games had semi-installed -- removing the one Season file that somehow made is way on there, C:\Program Files\EA Games\The Sims 2 Seasons\TS Bin\TS2UPD0, is what allowed me to install Seasons after cleaning it off, but since then the game seems to be under the impression that it successfully installed Pets when it did not -- I can open up a 'hood, and the little Pets button in the sub-'hoods bar will be clickable (and the startup menu will list Pets as an installed EP), but if I try to load a lot then the game will crash.

Can't even load an unpopulated lot -- I assume it's an "it thinks there a Pets objects in that buy mode catalog, but there are not" thing. I haven't tried opening Create-A-Sim.

There are no Pets-related files on my computer except for a since-removed PetBreeds\PetBreedBin.package under the My Documents\EA path (I even checked regedit), and when I try to install it, it says: "error executing D:\Support\EReg.exe %1 is not a valid Win32 application".

So now I can't play without Pets, I can't install Pets, I can't uninstall Pets, and the game is under the impression that I already have Pets installed and... well. That's the problem as far as I can tell, at least. :faceslap:

[Peni Griffin]

In the FAQ for installing and uninstalling, there's instructions for making sure that every single little systems file didn't get uninstalled properly - basically going into places you normally wouldn't go, hunting for specific files that a bad uninstall might have missed, and deleting them manually. That would seem to be the logical thing to try next, as an imperfect install might well lead to an imperfect uninstall.

[thiafy]

You mean this (http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Uninstall#How_to_Fully_Uninstall_Sims_2) , yeah? The problem is, I never uninstalled it in the first place. Pets doesn't show up under the Control Panel's "add/remove programs" thing, it doesn't show up under C:\Program Files, it doesn't show up under the registry -- as far as I was aware, before I started having problems, it hadn't installed in the first place at all.

The game is somehow under the impression that it is installed, but it isn't installed. None of the files mentioned in that tutorial are there, and there isn't a single Pets-related file other than the PetBreedBin one that I can find. But it shows up under my in-game expansion notifying buttons as though it's installed, and clearly it's trying to load Pets-related content for it to be crashing like it is. So... I'm confused. D:


:!: EDIT: The game works! It turns out that the PetBreedBin file was the reason it thought Pets was installed, and it loads every time I try to install Pets -- so every time I tried to fix it, I made it not work again. I'm assuming that there's a serious problem with my Pets disc, but Seasons works gorgeously and my game runs just fine, now, so I'm happy.

Thank you very much, Peni and Simsample -- neither suggestion was quite the solution per se, but both pointed me in exactly the right direction. :)