I have read the threads in the forums on this topic but have a question not covered.

 

I currently have FSX Deluxe with SP1 + SP2 installed and having a problem with the view of the PAPI lights from the cockpit giving wrong perspective and have tried to repair camera.cfg but no joy and also tried reinstall of SP2 and no joy.  I have therefore decided to uninstall SP2 and SP1 and then run the FSX repair from the DVD.

 

My question and concern is that when I added various addons over the course of time, several of them updated certain system files and DX files that seem to have been downloaded from Microsoft site (?).  I know that some of these files may no longer be available.  What will happen then if FSX repair replaces these files with the originals from the disk?  Will I have to then re-install all my addons to bring them up to usable status? (and hope Microsoft still has these available?)

Most likely you will have to reinstall...

 

No one can completely say since vendor add-on software will make changes to FSX originial files to allow their products to work properly.

 

The best advice I can give is the next time you ' Start from Scratch ' and after you have everything installed the way you like, backup your system and at least if things go awry then you can restore to the time before when everything at that time was working well...

 

The best advice I can give is the next time you ' Start from Scratch '

 

Hopefully I'll never have to "start from scratch".  I had to do that once 18 months ago and it took a good 6 months before I correctly got everything back to top operation.   I do have "restore" activated on my VISTA 64 but it only allows me to go back a few days.  I tried a restore that should have brought all my programs back to their pre-problem state but I think my problem lies in one of the ".ini" or ".cfg" files that I must have corrupted and of course those files remain untouched during a "restore".  My question is based on a probable assumption that activating FSX repair will not replace any "run-time" dll's that have a later date than that of the RTM.  Normally that should be the case but I just wanted confirmation.

 

I do maintain a CD backup from a year ago and your suggestion brought this to mind. Good advice.  I will try to repair from that source before I dive into a full FSX repair.  Thanks.

I use a single hard drive with a clean win 7 OS and FSX install... after I'm done with the major installs I image it and keep for future use..

The hard part is remembering what I installed after the ' clean ' image... but it still beats starting over all over again.

Before you undo six months of work, here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rftx6qq3zqos53j/Cameras.zip

you will find a virgin copy of the cameras.cfg file.

 

Bear in mind that many aircraft come with their own custom camera.cfg entries in the aircraft.cfg file, so if your problem is not universal, you can cure them with a simple reinstall of the aircraft only.

 

Regards,

Nick

You have to look at what a repair will do.  It will return FSX back to the original installation so, if you replaced any fsx textures with GEX or any other program that replaces default textures, you will have to reinstall (or repair) that installation too.  A repair returns all of your default files.  There are some programs that replace or remove files in the Effects folder and, of course, most AI programs will rename your default AI traffic file so you will get back default traffic again.  It will not mess with any addon scenery or any commercial addon aircraft as most are standalone products.  You would be wise to backup the folder where your fsx.cfg resides and your scenery.cfg as those files will be returned to the default.  I think the logbook.bin in your Documents\My Flight Sim files will be replaced too but all of the flightplans, etc. will remain.  When repairing, make sure you repair SP1 and SP2 or if you have Acceleration, you repair that too.  I did a repair several years ago as I had to get back some .fx files that a program had removed from my system.  It worked well for me and I do not recall having to reinstall anything but had to replace my fsx.cfg, dll.xml, and scenery.cfg with the ones I had backed up. 

 

You really do not have that much installed so a complete reinstall would not be that difficult in the event a repair did not work.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Thanks to the responders.  I thought I had a CD backup of my full FSX setup as of end of 2012 but can't find it so I will first try the virgin camera file from Nick and if no joy then perform the FSX RTM repair with cautions suggested by Jim.  I still wish I knew how this happened and what file is corrupted to cause it.

 

Oops!  @ Nick:  there was nothing in the drop box when I just checked!   Message says "file has been deleted or removed"

Try again, from here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ggvhh4q3yoyuue/Cameras.zip

a colleague of mine removed it.

I doubt if he knows why :smile:

He can't see it in this folder.

 

Regards,

Nick

Got it.  Thanks, Nick