Installation troubles: Copy Protection sucks

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Atraxani

New Member
Aug 6, 2005
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I purchased UT2003 shortly after it was released, and have recently become interested in playing the game again. Unfortunately, CD2 has been accidently scratched, rendering the file UCgeneric.utx.uz2 corrupt.

When I attempt to install, all goes well until the process gets to this file, at this point I am notified of the bad file, and the installation aborts. I tried the following:

I copied all files off of the CDs, replaced the bad version of UCgeneric.utx.uz2 with a good copy, and reburned them to CDs. It didn't work, because the CD was "invalid".

I tried creating virtual CDs. The same problem reared it's ugly head in a different manifestation.

When the installation aborts, it leaves a few textures and static meshes uncopied to the installation directory. I tried manually copying them, and manually decompressing them (why is there no * wild card for decompressing with UCC...? ) unfortunately, this doesn't work. On execution of UT2003.exe, I am told that my CD key is invalid.

I did some research, determined what registry keys UT2003 needed, where to put them, and the values. I manually created these values and entered them into the registry, including my own, valid, purchased CD key. It didn't work.

Excuse me if I don't have the wherewithal to splurg money on a new copy of every CD that goes bad on me.

Does anyone have an idea or solution? Thanks in advance.
 
Zur

Zur

surrealistic mad cow
Jul 8, 2002
11,708
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Atraxani said:
Excuse me if I don't have the wherewithal to splurg money on a new copy of every CD that goes bad on me.
Click to expand...

I think it's high time to start making backups of your originals using the appropriate software ;) . As for the damaged cd, you technically don't own and should be able to get a replacement from the publisher (I say should because it's a slow and tedious process).
 
Taleweaver

Taleweaver

Wandering spirit
May 11, 2004
2,630
0
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Off course
Azura said:
As for the damaged cd, you technically don't own and should be able to get a replacement from the publisher (I say should because it's a slow and tedious process).
Click to expand...
Ehm...I don't know how long the garantee period is valid, but 2 years seems like a long time :hmm:

@Atraxi: if the file on the cd is corrupt (due to a scratched cd or something), it's very well possible that copying the files doesn't work either, even if you manage to avoid all the anti-copy procedures. You can still try, of course...

On the other hand, ut2003 is dropped down in price seriously, almost to the point where it's cheaper than blanc cd's. This has everything to do with ut2004, that includes all the content of ut2003, plus a whole bunch more. It also means that most ut2003 players changed to ut2004, leaving the '03 online activity pretty low.
Also...not too long ago, Angelmapper (a regular forummer around here) offered on the UP forums that she'd send her ut2003 copy to whomever paid back the shipping costs. AFAIK, there were no takers...
 
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Atraxani

New Member
Aug 6, 2005
2
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Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. I have resolved the problem.

The problem wasn't that I needed the CD inserted to play, the problem was that I couldn't complete an installation of the game. As such, simply installing the latest patch couldn't fix the problem, because the game needs to be installed before a patch can be applied.

I attempted to use CloneCD, however, because halfway through the copy process, cloneCD would abort, because it was unable to read the disk. Afterall, the disk was corrupt.

I however, was able to put together a complete set of files present on both disks, and put these into two directories (CD1 and CD2), both within the same parent directory. For some reason, the the installer was smart enough to look in CD1\system\..\..\CD2\whatever when it needed to access files from the second disk. (By the way, ".." in windows is a character string which represents the parent directory of the working directory, for those of you who don't know.)

Again, thanks to all who contributed advice.
 
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