VFR Photographic Scenery FS2004

[Bridon Bear]

Hi,

Me again... As you all know I have had to buy a new PC recently and am getting on with the re-install of FS9....sorted out the AA on the graphics and the Frame Rates etc....all smooth as silk.

Until today.....Went to install VFR Photographic Parts 1,2,3 & 4 and the validation part is falling over with an error message telling me to re-insert disc in the CD Drive....then it tells me fstype.dll has failed to load. This is the same with any of the 4 volumes (and sure enough, looking on the root of the installer discs is the forementioned culprit fstype.dll version 4.0.0.13 dated 2002!!) The thing is they are all original discs given to me last year by someone moving on to other things and they installed perfectly on my old PC no problem.

A quick Google has turned up several problems with this, apparently it is a SafeDisc security thing. The JustFlight Forums have many postings on this but they are 'old' postings 2003-4 with nothing current and the advice was to update the drivers on everything you can....my new PC has the latest drivers for everything exceeding those dates posted by 4 years or so.

The PC is set to myself as full 'Administer', all anti-virus etc was disabled prior to my attempts to install so in frustration, to test a theory, I put the disc in my wife's 6 year old 1Ghz PC and the darn things run straight past the 'Validation' part that throws up these error codes on my machine with no problem at all....(proving the discs are not faulty at least...!!)

Surely there must be a workaround?.....can anyone suggest anything?....are my brand new DVD Drives incompatible.... (LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1P and

TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S203B (Samsung)



WinXP Home
Pentium Duel Core E2180 1MB Cache 64bit Processor (2 x 1.8Ghz)
2 GB DDR2 667Mhz Ram
250GB Serial ATA II HD
NVidia 8500GT 512MB PCI-E
Intel 946GZ Chipset MicroTX Motherboard

Regards.

Bridon Bear (Considering another hobby..... :brick: )

[cstorey]

This is possibly a half baked suggestion, but have you tried adding a line to fs9.cfg under a section OLD MODULES with fstype.dll=1. I recall that this had to be done with earlier sound modules to make them work. It might also be an idea manually to copy fstype.dll from the discs to FS9 Modules

Chris

[JimCooper]

BB,

Clutching at straws here but.....
suspect the Read-Speed of your new DVD-Drives (too fast????)...so take the CD-Drive out of the old PC and put it in the new PC and install via that.
Or if the PCs are networked: Share the CD drive on the old PC and install via that across the network

Jim

[Bridon Bear]

Hi Chris.....good idea, I have found that to be the cure for an error message arising from addons such as the MAAM DC3 if I recall correctly..

The trouble I have on this install is occuring well before it gets pointed to FS......otherwise a good idea though.

Just had another idea (which didn't work.... :-( )

I inserted the disc, made a copy of the contents to a folder on my HD, removed the disc and ran the program from the setup.exe there....still the same 'error 0x80040702 failed to load .dll FSTYPE Installation will now terminate'.....proves there is no compatibility problem with the drives though... :roll:

Regards.

Bridon Bear

[ianhind]

BB

I am also in the process of reinstalling FS9 on a new machine. My VFR scenery did install from a similar DVDRW (TSST 202N).

Of course you have tried installing from both DVD drives

Since all of your installs fail, maybe it is a combination of the "security" protection software and your particular setup.

Anyway looking around the murkier bits of the internet, instructions on how to defeat the protection are out there. Typically ironic that those who have the genuine article have no support while those who download the torrents get all the help they need!

I have succeeded in getting all 40000+ files (3.07Gb) from the VFR1 CDs on to my hard disk. I am just looking to see where they would need to be moved to in the FS2004 folder by comparison with my successful install.

So a workaround does seem possible - just not straightforward!

Ian

EDIT: alternatively if your wife's PC is connected to yours via a network or has a CD-writer, you could install the scenery on to that PC and thne get the files on to yours (each scenery is going to occupy 3 CDs when zipped). There is a simple way to fool the other PC that FS2004 is installed so that VFR scenery installation proceeds.

[Bridon Bear]

Well I have found a workaround....

I have an external HD which I plugged into my Wife's PC...installed all 4 Volumes on her PC direct into 4 new folders I made on the external HD. An hour or two later (Her Machine is USB 1.... :roll: ) all the files were done.....then plugged it into my PC and installed the files into FS2004....placed all 4 volumes in scenedb folder then manually added all 12 parts individually to the scenery library, exit and restart FS and Voila....normal VFR flying scenery has resumed.

Next job VFR Terrain which could not find the VFR Photographic scenery as there was no trace of course in the registry. So another part manual install to get all that working......which it now all does.

Bottom line is that all these hours of work because the simplistic copy protection on the discs prevented what should have been a painless excercise of a simple install.

At least it has been accomplished... ;-)

Edit: Just seen your posting Ian....similar idea...thanks for your input...great minds think alike.... CHEERS

Regards.

Bridon Bear xwink

[ianhind]

Brian

Might be worth burning a DVD or two to avoid a repeat performance in the future!

Ian

[Bridon Bear]

Allready done Ian.... ;-) First thing I did to prevent all that nonsense in the future......but thanks for mentioning it.

Regards


Bridon Bear xsmile