Duplicate Install CONFLICT

[cookedinlh]

Few months ago I had a BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH "event" during a Windows 10 upgrade. I lost the entire OS . . no way to recover. . .Instead of stripping the old 1T SSD drive (which was my C: Drive) I bought a new SSD (250Gig) as my C:Drive and loaded a new WIN10 OS on it . . and after a painful week of recovering applications and files I installed a new P3D v3.2.3 on it. All good so far. P3D working great.

Last week I ran a v3.3.5 upgrade and it only allowed me to "repair" or "uninstall" . . I chose repair. . . Now I seem to have v3.3.5 running on the old 1T SSD G:Drive and v3.2.3 runs on the C:drive. . Both seem to run sort of. Missing some scenery connections or having a duplicate aircraft (solvable) . . .BUT

Question is how do I now upgrade to v3.4 and get rid of the v3.3.5 on G: without losing all my settings, controls, scenery and shaders . . REx4 Textures, Soft Clouds and more? . . are both these installs now connected to the WIN10 registry? . . both seem to run....can I uninstall the G:Dive version somehow without screwing up the C:drive version I want to be v3.4? There is only one version apparently installed in the programs list. . . so why does the old g:drive file even work? It is the one that seemed to be upgraded with the repair.

Just noticed the installed version in Programs is v3.3.5 . . but it is on the G: drive. So why can I run v3.2.3 from the C:drive?

Don't want to touch anything yet till I can figure this out
Thanks
Cooked again!

[Beau Hollis]

Sorry to hear about you trouble with the windows update. You can only install one instance of each major versions (v1, v2, v3) of Prepar3D. Each of these products use their own product name such as "Prepar3D v3" for folders containing configuration files and settings so that they can safely run side by side. The installation should only allow one instance of v3 to install, but if you were to make a copy of the Prepar3D v3 application folder, it should technically still function. In your case, you have copies of older versions. These still function as long as you have one valid installed and activated copy because they share the same product and license information.

If you want to retain settings, simply uninstall whichever version shows up in your program list, and install the latest. While your configs, settings, and any add-ons using external pathing should generally upgrade, you may need to reinstall any add-ons that wrote files into the Prepar3D application folder. If you still experience problems, we recommend that you back up your Prepar3D configuration folders and then remove them and let Prepar3D generate clean versions.

Once you update, you should only run Prepar3D.exe from the installed application folder. You may want to remove/rename the other copies of Prepar3D to avoid confusion. There are several potential problems with running Prepar3D from multiple locations:
1) The installer only known about one folder, and can only uninstall or repair that one folder.
2) Some 3rd party add-ons copy data into the application directory. Depending on how these add-on installers work, they may use the wrong folder and get your Prepar3D install into a bad state.
3) All copies of Prepar3D will read/write to the same configuration folders, so scenery indexes, saved scenarios, application settings, etc will be shared between copies. Running 3.2 with configurations and scenarios saved out in 3.3 or 3.4 is not something we typlically test, or can officially support. (though we do version the shader cache, so you shouldn't get crashing from loading bad shaders.)

[cookedinlh]

Thanks for the detailed and quick response. I do want to run or have only one copy. I have 2 instances of V3 on two different drives. (resulting from replacing the C:Drive and retaining the old C:Drive as Drive G:) .....So it seems the v3.3.5 that shows up in "Programs and Features" is my original install on the G:drive (used to be my C:Drive) and it is the one being "repaired" when I update. So then how would I uninstall or delete the last install I did on the new C:drive? . . just delete the Lockheed folders? . . leave all the Appdata/Roaming files alone?

Only way I can find to easily send you my install version (G:drive) is to upload the image to my sim page. You can see some parts are installed in August 15 Those are 3.3.5 on the G Drive. . . but those dated 21 Jul . . some are 3.3.5 and some 3.2.3. so I can't be sure which files matter. Beginning to think I might be better to start all over again.
http://www.dcooke.com/flight-sim.html

Many thanks for all your help this is a mess looking to become a disaster.
Cooked again.

[Beau Hollis]

In general, to do a client-only update, you would uninstall the 3.3 client and then install the 3.4 client to the same folder. As long as the scenery, content, and client are installed to the same directory, you should be able to update each separately by doing an uninstall/reinstall. Uninstalling the client shouldn't remove your configuration files, but I think that uninstalling the entire Prepar3D v3 product would. I full uninstall/reinstall might not be a bad idea given the state of things.

[cookedinlh]

Sadly . . sniff . . I think I agree.
Thanks so much for the explanations . . . will check back in a week or so.
Cheers
Cooked again