Here's one...Unreal 2 doesn't _install_.

Perish the thought that my Unreal 2 play disc might have been damaged before I even installed the game!

I've had the game since January, however I only recently got around to installing a 64 MB Radeon card that I've also had for quite a while, though not as long. (Moving to a new house can be a major cause of delay in a person's life.) I got the card in, and it worked like a charm after a couple of restarts. So I immediately went to try to install Unreal 2.

The installation wizard gets to 43% installation and requests the other disc. I put it in, and I get an "Unexpected Failure" error in the wizard. I got a blue screen at one point saying that a certain sector is unreadable, and that the disc might need to be cleaned if it was in the drive. Then it puts my computer to sleep before I can take the disc out, and it doesn't accept any keystrokes or mouse clicks to wake it up.

So I manually restart my computer and pull the disc out to clean it. Nothing looks wrong, but I clean the disc anyway. Then I try installing again, and the same thing happens. Next, I copy everything on the disc to a folder on my hard drive, and then I try installing again. This time, when the other disc is requested, I specify the folder to which the disc had been copied, and it happens again. Finally, I use QuickZip to open up the copy of data3.cab I put on my hard drive, and I get an error of "Cabinet error 2 (type 0)". Just to check, I open some of the .cab files in the DirectX folder, and they open without any problems.

What do I do? Is my copy of Unreal 2 ruined before I get to derive any enjoyment out of it? I'd like to think that I didn't spend $30.00 on it for nothing. The only reason I didn't play it when I bought it was because it ran so poorly on my "new computer" that used integrated S3 SavagePro graphics (and that computer eventually became a Mother's Day gift because it was so useless to me, especially when I found out that the Radeon card wouldn't function in it).

SkaarjMaster, I did not think of burning the entire CD. Technically, I can do it, since I have the CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, but if this were the solution, then why didn't it work when I copied the contents of the disc to a folder on my hard drive?

Sir_Brizz, did Dell use CD drives with this flaw back in the year 2000? This is where the computer I'm using is from. Unfortunately, I don't have UT2003, so I have no way of using it for a comparison. However, I have Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Undying, and DS9: The Fallen. All of these games have managed to install correctly; are any of them SecureROM discs?

In fact, if this is the problem at all, wouldn't the CD-ROM and -RW drives on my computer also have trouble reading the Install Disc too? As I mentioned before, I don't have problems until I get to the point where I put the Play Disc in.

I'll check into these tomorrow, because I'm not currently at my own computer. (Also, this computer doesn't have the hard drive space available to install Unreal 2, even if I hadn't left the discs back at home with my own computer.)

Well, I have my mom's computer. There's no chance of Unreal 2 actually running on that computer, but it has plenty of space on the hard drive for it to be installed. I've had a hard day, so I'll try it either tomorrow or the next day. Real life has kept me away out of my home for most of each day, and it's taking its toll on me.

It just seems rather counterintuitive to me. If I were part of Legend, I would have either applied SecuROM to every disc in the game or none of the discs at all.

Good news...I managed to set aside 10 minutes to try this out, and Unreal 2 does install on my mom's computer.

So, for the sake of argument, let's say that I temporarily pull the hard drive (FAT32) out of my own computer, and make it a slave drive in my mom's computer (NTFS). I could conceivably just copy everything into an Unreal2 folder on my own hard drive, copy the registry entries for Unreal 2, and then modify them once my hard drive is back in my own computer, right? If so, then I guess my problems are solved, except for the fact that I need to start looking for a new CD-ROM drive for my computer.

Oh, and I have reason to believe that SecuROM was also on the install disc. During the successful install, the wizard didn't request the play disc until 47% through the installation. However, in all the failed installations, the play disc was requested at 43%, suggesting that something near the "end" of the install disc was not readable by my CD-ROM drive.

(Pardon me if this is a little too much information. I tend to look at such problems from a scientist's perspective.)