Running FFXI from external hard driveFollow

Hello. This is my first post, and unfortunately, it has to be a call for some help.

I had installed FFXI and all three of its expansions onto my new 250G external hard drive sometime after Christmas and everything was working wonderfully up until I tried playing yesterday.

The computer I used to install the game is my boyfriend's Sony Vaio laptop with 100G hard drive. He got it last year, so it's fairly new and is a pretty nice machine. It's good enough to run WoW without much trouble, except for when he gets to a town/city that has a bunch of other people already there and then it gets laggy.

The reason why I chose to install FFXI to my external hard drive rather than to the laptop's internal one is because my boyfriend has/had loaded up the internal drive with so many of his games and other files that there would be barely any space left at all if I were to install FFXI there.

The game was working fine after I'd installed it initially, but now when I try to run the POL viewer, it gives me a message telling me to "check my access priveledges" and that "the path the program is referring to does not exist".

So I tried running the viewer from the CD, and that was working up until I tried to actually *play* the game, when it said that "it was unable to start because the game is not yet installed."

Should I try uninstalling and installing the game again? And if so, which hard drive would be the preferrable choice (I know, probably the internal one, huh?)?

Thanks for taking the time to read this long explanation/question and if anyone's got any suggestions I would appreciate them a LOT!

EDIT:

I just thought of something that might be the cause of this. I have installed the main game (Final Fantasy XI) and all three of its' expansions, but the only one I was able to register to my POL account was ToAU, and every time I would log on to the game it would remind me to register and/or install them or I might run into some trouble running the game and I just remembered that today and I thought that THAT might be it.

Edited, Jan 15th 2007 11:19am by tenshinoyuki

Edited, Jan 15th 2007 11:24am by tenshinoyuki

I'm having a similar problem...

I just did a PC recovery on my laptop, and apparently the registry for quite a few programs was deleted.

I get this error message:

"Cannot open registry key for install path of Playonline-compatible software. ID=1000"

A couple times, and then:

"Playonline Viewer installation cannot write to specified destination folder. Please check your access privileges."

Now, I'm pretty sure it's a registry problem...and I don't know if PC recovery would have backed up those registry files somewhere on the computer. If it did, then I wouldn't know where to find them. I just have the feeling I'm going to need to buy the game again.

You mean as opposed to downloading it from a torrent or something?

I can't download torrents because I'm accessing the internet from a school network that doesn't allow us to use them, unfortunately.

However, if you can provide me with a way to get the game without paying for it again, I'd be very grateful. :3

That's the thing-- I lost it a loooong time ago.

I had one of the versions with FFXI, the RoZ, and CoP. And it's been missing for a while.

The only thing I have that I know the location of is the ToAU expansion.

Sooo...that's why I think I'll be buying a new copy.