spring cleaning

[Romflyer]

On Saturday I was poking around in 'add and remove programs' on my tired old rig trying to free up some much needed space......while I was in there I saw a couple of old planes in there that I havent flown forever (cant remember which planes they were) so I thought to myself, if I havent flown these in such a long time then lets just press that remove button.
All was good until last night when fired up the sim and wanted to take out one of my all time old favourites the Aerosoft Beaver........no gauges in the modern cockpit!!! .......well I guess I'll have to move up to another favourite the 737 experience  8-).......... a few missing gauges, and no radio stack ........simmers sky MD-11.......same as 737  :-[
Does anyone have any ideas on how I might salvage this situation without a re-install?  :-/    If I use a restore point(which I've never tried) will it work for this?......or maybe I should go and try to manually retreive stock gauges off the disks  :P
Any help or advice would much appreciated......
Cheers
Rom

[Travis]

I rarely (if ever) use the install/uninstall systems sent with most products.  At least directly to the FS location.  Invariably, someone will write in an automatic overwrite of some menial thing, with disastrous results.  Your best bet, in the future, is to always install things to a separate temp folder on your desktop, and then manually move things over as you would with any zip file.

As for your gauges: are they the stock ones?  If so, you can just go to the CDs and find them, but they aren't sectioned into CAB files.  I would suggest doing an alternate install on your system, then moving all the gauge files over, then uninstalling the new FS installation.  It may take awhile, but you won't lose anything.

[Maverick6901]

Romflyer,

I'm not an expert when it comes to FS2004 and the addons, but as a computer tech I can tell you that the system restore function (XP/Vista) will not and was never designed to restore 3rd party programs or missing components.  So using that feature will not help you get your missing gauges back.  I think that Travis has given the only viable solution.

[Hagar]

If I remember correctly most of the default gauges are in msgame3.cab on FS9 CD-2. Extract this to a Temp folder on your HDD before pasting the contents of the Gauges folder into FS9\Gauges.

[Opa]

If you ever need to restore anything from your FS2004 install disks, these resources will be helpful:

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/faq001.html

It shows where everything is on your install disks and how extract just what you need.

I also recommend fs9cddir.zip - compiled by Brian Collins. Not sure if it in the library here but it is available at Avsim.com and Flightsim.com.

This is an Excel format listing of all the files and where to find them on your install disks. A great resource to keep handy.

Good luck!  

[Romflyer]

Opa

Thank you

[homebrewer]

System Restore. There should be several dates to which you can go back. It has saved my tokhus in the past...