Can't Install My Photoshop 7 again. The setup.exe seems dead.

Question

I can't Install My Photoshop 7 again. The setup.exe file seems dead. The CD looks fine.
I reinstalled a fresh version of Win. XP Pro Sp3 and it wiped out several of my programs so I've been re-installing them. Of course I lost the registry and have to build a new one by reinstalling my programs. But my Photoshop 7 CD seems to have a dead setup.exe file and it will not respond as it used to. I've tried everything including disabling virus program. I don't know what else to do. Maybe I need a new setup.exe file but I have no idea where I could get one.
Yes, I do have a registered product. Can anyone help me?
Thanks, Judi

Answer 1

Thank you so much for your suggestion R_Kelly.
Yes, I had tried copying the contents of the installation disk to both my external Seagate drive and right onto the C: drive, itself, but with no success.
But I just experienced a miracle and it installed like butter - to my utter amazement.  I will share my experience in case someone comes along with a similar problem and maybe my situation will help them.
When I installed the "rescue disk" to replace my entire OS on my laptop, the techs had given me some choices in options which I really didn't know how to choose from, and I was a professional IT person in the late 90's. That's where I got into trouble. What I wanted to do was just overwrite my Windows XP Pro SP3, like we could do back in the "old days" when computers were open-source and not all proprietary. When I selected to delete the current Windows partition to make room for the new installation, apparently it also deleted the registry and my computer had no knowledge of the programs I had installed and I had to reinstall just about everything.   I thought I was okay with that.
In the process of finally installing the new Windows OS, I was asked to give my computer a "name."  Well, I don't recall that I ever gave it a name before and there was no place for me to go to find out. So, I gave it a name "JudiLenova."  When I couldn't get my programs to run, I thought that maybe I had not only lost my Registry file but maybe whatever ini files I had left didn't recognize that name, so I changed it to "Judi," still not recalling what, if any, name I had given it before.  As I encountered problems with trying to install Photoshop, I looked at my systems directories and saw that there were equal files in two different pathways, one for each name. I wondered if maybe DOS, which can't make decisions, couldn't decide which path was the right one to find files I needed. I sure regretted not using the "repair" option on the rescue disk, but it was too late. I need this computer to operate using all of the tools I have installed on it.
I bought a powerful fixit program recommended by CNET to fix things and it found over 1400 problems, but still nothing fixed this problem.
One thing I had noticed is that sometimes when I would do a restart of the computer, the Windows Installer would suddenly show up to finish the Photoshop install, but then it would stop initializing because of the restart. (So close, and yet so far away!)  I knew the old system was long gone and stupidly I had deleted the full backup I had stored on the Seagate, so I looked at the "restore" option to see what setpoints there were to see if maybe I could roll back to an earlier time. The only restore point I had was for the day I had installed the rescue disk. I said "what the heck" and opted to roll it back. When I made that selection, I got the message that the major change would be that the computer name would be changed from "Judi" to "JudiLenova."  I thought that might solve some of my problem. Amazingly, it appears to have solved the Photoshop problem because I put the disk back into my D: drive and off she went without a hitch!
My hunch is that DOS couldn't find the Install Shield to enable the installation. Whatever the cause of the miracle, I'm grateful that I didn't toss my computer in the lake outside my window... but it sure was tempting.
Thank you again for your attempts to rescue me. I hope this helps the next guy who comes along.  Now I'm going to try to install all the rest of my beloved old Adobe programs and everything else.   Fingers crossed!
Judi :-)