Cannot get the game to work now, but it used to! - Where are the logs??

My hard drive on my laptop died recently and so went my fm2010 install (been playing it since the game was released). No worries I thought, buy a new hard drive, reinstall vista (i know, i know, but it came with the laptop), and then reinstall the game from my official game disc (I don't like using steam so use the offline install option instead).

When I try and install, it goes through the whole process and when it finishes 'configuring fm for my machine', it says 'installation completed, serious errors encountered, please check the log'.... unfortunately it doesn't say where this magical log is or what went wrong so I'm stuck on how to fix the problems, or even figure out what went wrong. If I then try and run the game, I get an error without an error code or anything, it just says it has crashed which again is absolutely useless.

I have installed EVERY available vista update, downloaded and installed java runtime environment 1.6.20 and and am now thoroughly at a loss.

Could anyone please advise on how I can get the game to work... I wouldn't mind if the game had never worked, but it has been working fine on this laptop since the release date so there is no reason why it shouldn't work now!

If no-one knows how to fix it, perhaps someone could point me in the direction of the logs so I can try and figure it out myself?

Thanks in advance.

As well as Java you will need to ensure that directX and all the hardware drivers are updated, especially the graphics card.

Thanks for the response.

I have now updated the graphics card driver (although the newest driver was released in 2008).

I have downloaded and installed direct x 11.

Unfortunately neither of these have made any difference. I still get the same undefined error

Is it JRE that I needed to update, or is java different to that? (just checking).

Do you know where the error log might be kept?

When I try and install, it goes through the whole process and when it finishes 'configuring fm for my machine', it says 'installation completed, serious errors encountered, please check the log'....

If no-one knows how to fix it, perhaps someone could point me in the direction of the logs so I can try and figure it out myself?

Thanks in advance.

when ive had this problem if i ever have to re-install all i do is totally delete everything to with FM2010 and sports interactive from my pc/laptop including registry files apart from gave saves and skins and stuff just move them from the sports interactive folder in mydocuments and then reboot PC/LAPTOP and reinstall but only make sure everything is running in background and your not running loads of applications while reinstalling and hopefully that should fix it

Thanks for the suggestion.

I tried clearing out everything, removing all the user specific data and all the leftover temp dirs etc (following the fm uninstall process). I then restarted the machine and tried the install again. It did all the install and then gave the usual error again Anyone got any other ideas on how to fix this or know where the logs are?

I got sick of trying everything I could think of (including messing with compatibility modes) without getting anywhere, so decided to try and install FM09 (using uniloc). It ran through the install fine and accepted my key thankfully - even though this was actually the second time I had installed the game which worried me a bit. At least now I can play some sort of football manager in between searching for a solution to my FM10 problem. Has anyone successfully run the FM2010 game on Vista Ultimate Edition? My old Vista was Home Premium so I wonder if that might be causing some issues?