Can not Install SyncToy...

We were seeing some issues with the hard drive on my wife's pc recently so, I ordered two Maxtor 300GB Hard drives from Tiger Direct last week.

It turned out to be a very timely order! To my surprise, I lost two hard drives out of four on my two HP XW6000 PCs the very same weekend. Luckily, I was checking the Event Viewer and noticed "dsk" alerts like:

"The driver has detected that device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 has predicted that it will fail. Immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent."

I was able to back up all my data before they totally crashed :) So, I installed new drives on my PCs. One XP and one Windows 2003. I tend to use my own scripts & robocopy for back up but wanted to install Microsoft's SyncToy 1.2 on my XP box. Guess what? I could not...

During SyncToy installation, I got the message below:

This setup requires the .NET Framework version 1.1.4322. Please install the .NET Framework and run this setup again. The .NET Framework can be obtained from the web. Would you like to do it now? Yes Button No Button

Yes Button will lead you to http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx. From here you have the choice of 3 .NET Framework versions to choose from as of this writing, among Service Packs, SDKs, Compact Framework, Redistributable for Windows 2003, and others. And nowhere does it mention version 1.1.4322, which is required according to the message mentioned above.

Because I installed everything from scratch, Windows update installed .NET Framework 2.0.50727 on my machine and it appears that it is not backward compatible. What a shame!

I downloaded .NET Framework 1.1 from Microsoft but it would not install. I googled and it looks like there are others who had the same issue. I liked the blog entry from Haidong Ji, who has a good blog called Ji Village News. You can read his story here...

So, I guess I will keep on using Robocopy :)