Well, in all my years of using BIAB this has never happened.

I started up BIAB this morning and it said there was an update available, so I went ahead and installed just like I have many, many times before.

At the end of the install it came up with an error message about being unable to install bbw.exe because it already existed, and asked if I wanted to retry or abort. I retried a couple of times, same error, so I selected abort.

It said it was rolling back the changes. I then clicked on the BIAB desktop shortcut, it said the location the shortcut pointed to no longer exists.

Now when I look in c:\bb there is no bbw.exe file, so the rollback obviously didn't work.

How do I recover from this?????

UPDATE: I tried to recover by downloading the patch from the site here and running it. It fails because it says it must be installed on top of an existing BIAB installation, I suppose it's looking for c:\bb\bbw.exe which no longer exists because the rollback procedure during the previous attempt didn't restore that file.

Not a great situation, but probably resolvable.

Maybe just the shortcut has lost the link.

Can you double re-check to see if you possibly now have a file "C:\bb\bbw.exe"

If you run the update instead (right-click and select run as Administrator), does it manage to install the files correctly?

No, I definitely do not have c:\bb\bbw.exe

The update will not run either, it seems it looks for that file to make sure it is being installed to the correct location.

I'm going to try and grab an old bbw.exe from the install USB drive, copy it over to c:\bb, and hopefully that will be enough to get the update to install.

UPDATE: Ok, after copying over bbw.exe from my install drive I was able to apply the update and all is well again

BUT! There is a bug someplace with the patch routine.

I have no idea why the initial patch update failed, that is one issue, but more important is the fact that the rollback routine failed to recover properly from the update failing.

Good thing I kept my original install drive!

Dave,

Over the years, I've had a couple of updates go awry. It's been very rare but it has happened. What I have done in such circumstances is...

1. go to the link below

http://www.pgmusic.com/support_windowsupdates.htm

2. download the previous update (in this case it will be #516)

3. manually install the update (I always right-click on it and select 'run as administrator' to install; also, double-check the paths are correct when you get to that part of the installation.)

Now try starting BIAB.

Just in case this is useful information, the missing BBW.EXE sounds like it could potentially be related to your antivirus. Norton and McAfee have, in recent times, automatically deleted BBW.EXE without notification for a number of users on these forums.

Glad you got it working! I just pass on the above in case it's useful in the future.

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel,

Thanks for the input!

That wouldn't have worked for me, because the update patch looks to see if there is a bbw.exe file in the directory you are trying to install the update to (in my case I always use the default c:\bb), if it is not there it will not proceed (fails with an error saying you must install the patch over an existing BIAB installation).

bbw.exe was definitely removed by my initial attempt to install update 519; whatever caused that update to fail also removed bbw.exe. I don't run real time virus check software here.

As I say my main concern is not so much that the update failed, it is the fact that the rollback also failed so I was dead in the water.

Fortunately I always keep the last couple of install drives around in case of emergency

I had the last update fail as well. My problem was that I chose the "UPDATE" sub folder in BIAB as the place to download the update. It seemed quite reasonable since it was a BIAB update after all.
Well the update failed and BIAB was unable to back out whatever changes had been made. I couldn't start BIAB and I couldn't restart the update.

It seems that the "UPDATE" folder is not the place to store updates.

My solution was to recover the BIAB exec file from the original install, download the update again, but to the default download folder and then do the update. It worked fine, but why have an an update folder that can't be used for updates?