after hdd crash on ssd/hdd setup, can't reinstall programs

Hi y'all. I'd like to get some help.

I'm new to Windows 7, and never used Vista, just XP. I just built a new system with an 80GB SSD, and used an old hard drive for data. I relocated my "User" files to the HDD, and installed only the most essential stuff to the SSD -- Drivers, Chrome and Starcraft 2. So I had Open Office and a few other things on the HDD.

Then the HDD quit working. So I replaced it.

But now when I try to re-install OpenOffice, it complains because drive F isn't there, which was the partition I had it installed on in the old drive. I expect I'll have problems with other software too.

If I try to uninstall it, I get the same thing: there's no drive F.

Any fixes for that? Any other tips for recovering from a hard drive failure when using a small-SSD / large-HDD setup?

Of course I can always resort to erasing the SSD and re-installing Windows 7. That's not the end of the world since this is just a week-old setup.

(BTW, I also had problems that my User space had no "My Documents" folder, etc, since I had relocated it to the dead hard drive. I created a new temp admin account, deleted my account, created a new account of the same name, and deleted the temp. That mostly worked, except there's now some weird folder I can't access.)

Thanks for any help you can offer!

What letter does your new HDD have? Whatever it is you can change it to F: using the Disk Management/More Actions/ All Tasks/Change Drive Letters and Paths function under Start/Computer/Manage.

Well now that seemed silly, but I tried it (or something similar; see below) and it worked. I had some unallocated space on my HDD, so I created a 100MB partition called F: (rather than changing the path of the data volume I was already using). Then I uninstalled OpenOffice, which no longer complained. Seems that it doesn't complain because it can't find the files, but only because it can't find the drive where the files MIGHT be. Weird. Then I immediately reinstalled. Thanks bbinnard!

I'm glad you got the problem fixed. The reason it happened was that, during your initial installation of Open Office, the installer set up some registry values that point to where the software got installed, namely F:. When you replaced the drive Windows of course had no idea that F: was never going to come back, so it assigned a new drive letter to the replacement. At this point the registry values were pointing to never-never land, and this is what stopped OpenOffice from installing. Allowing the system to see a real F: fixed it.