A change of harddrive and now ET won't install

(Bug16) #1

Hi guys,

I’ve been playing Enemy Territory since it came out and last week my old harddrive decided to finally die on me.

No problem. I install a new drive into the PC and get reinstalling. Everything seems fine until I try to reinstall either Return To Castle Wolfenstein or Enemy Territory. This is especially odd considering the only new hardware in the PC is the HD…

The problems/symptoms:

RtCW - I hit the “install” option on splash menu and the drive starts up, then flickers at speed but does nothing (I’ve left it happily grinding away for 5 minutes before I got bored). The only way to recover this is to reboot the PC.

ET - Same as above but I run this from the .exe file from a covermount CD.

As I said only the HD is new, the rest of my h/w is exactly the same with the same driver versions installed. It’s frustrating because ET was working fine last week on the same h/w!

I thought maybe it was the CDs and by sheer fluke both Wolf games had died. I’ve tried them on another PC and they work fine. I also copied the ET .exe from the CD to my HD, did a DOS file compare against both files and they are both exactly the same. I run the ET .exe from my HD and this time my windows display corrupts (completely garbled graphics). :angry:

My h/w (yeah it’s old so try and restrain the comments! :smiley: ):

Celeron 2.4GHz
512 RAM
80gig 7200 HD
Win98 OSR 1 (ahem!)
64Meg GeForce 2

Any ideas? Interestingly all other Quake 3 technology games work fine on my PC (Quake 3, Jedi Knight 2, Alice).

(MadJack) #2

Hmmmm… I would try to download ET directly to your HD and try to install it. Nevermind the RtCW for now.

I think you might have a CD Reader problem… Maybe it decided to die along with you HD?

(nUllSkillZ) #3

I don’t think it’s a CD problem.
Otherwise he could not install the OS.
And the file of CD is the same as on HD.
I’ve first thought it could be some damaged cluster of the HD.
But then he could not copy a file from CD to HD.

Strange problem.

Do you have problems installing other programs / games?
May be some file(s) or data necessary for games is missing.

Edit:

Oops, haven’t read your thread correctly, sorry.
Have seen that you haven’t got problems with other games.
Even stranger.

(Bug16) #4

Cheers for the replies guys. I’ve actually solved the problem (always the way when you give up and post for help!).

Basically my motherboard has onboard sound (which is crap) and I use a separate Sound Blaster soundcard.

I’d forgotten to disable my MBs soundcard after reinstalling everything onto the new drive. When I disabled it via Control Panel both Wolf and ET install no problem.

So, it’s partly my fault and partly a bug in the Wolf and ET installers.

Either way I’m still surprised at how badly the ET install failed.

(Bug16) #5

Heh, we both posted at the same time by the looks of things! :smiley:

(MadJack) #6

Yeah, except I deleted my post after I saw you fixed it… shrugs