karhide
8.5 was an odd release because I never upgraded to 8 and went straight to 8.5 from 7 so it should be a full installer.  
 
I have just double checked My Products and I definitely only have 8.5 in the list.  There is a setup file for 8.5 and upgrade to 8.5.1 and 8.5.2

Wasn't it so that if you downloaded 8.5, you had to have 8 installed, but it was possible to buy a full version of 8.5 as a hard copy without having 8? 8.5 was the first downloadable piece of SONAR.

It was Cakewalk's first downloadable upgrade. To make the download as small as possible, the downloadable upgrade was (and still is) not a full version of the product. Instead it uses an existing SONAR 8 installation. Full version downloads started with X1. There was an additional charge for the disks. All upgrades supplied on disk are full versions.

Most likely, it's looking for a registry entry.
 
Because it's the easiest thing to do, I'd first try copying the \program files\cakewalk tree over to the W7 drive and see if that makes the installer happy. If that doesn't do it, then go into regedit and export the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software registry key. Copy the .reg file over to the Win7 drive, boot into W7 and import it.
 

johnnyswingo
I have a dual boot machine, Win XP & 7, on separate drives. Since I purchased Sonor Studio 8.5, I've have had it on the XP drive. I can't find my 8.5 install disk and I want to install 8.5 on my Win 7 drive. I downloaded the 8.5 setup file from the "my products-downloads" section of my account. When I try to install the downloaded 8.5 setup, the ".cab" files extract then I get this message: "Cannnot locate the required version of the program on this system, please install the correct version of the program to use this patch." Is there a file, or something, that I can move from XP to 7 so I can install 8.5 onto my Win 7, so I can upgrade to a newer version of Sonor?
 
Thanks,
Johnny

If you're talking about upgrading to Sonar Platinum....you can skip all the rocket science of the 8.5 from 8 and just purchase the upgrade to Platinum

johnnyswingo
I have a dual boot machine, Win XP & 7, on separate drives. Since I purchased Sonor Studio 8.5, I've have had it on the XP drive. I can't find my 8.5 install disk and I want to install 8.5 on my Win 7 drive. I downloaded the 8.5 setup file from the "my products-downloads" section of my account. When I try to install the downloaded 8.5 setup, the ".cab" files extract then I get this message: "Cannnot locate the required version of the program on this system, please install the correct version of the program to use this patch." Is there a file, or something, that I can move from XP to 7 so I can install 8.5 onto my Win 7, so I can upgrade to a newer version of Sonor?
 
Thanks,
Johnny

If you have Sonar 8.5 registered on the Cakewalk site, no need to install it to purchase the upgrade.
 
Just FYI, I discovered this issue when trying to upgrade from 8 to 8.5 on an old XP laptop last weekend.  I thought why not uninstall 8 first?  Which is what I did.  Downloaded the 8.5 upgrade, and got the same error you did.
 
Fortunately, I still have the disks for the 8.5 upgrade, which apparently contains a full installer.