Rise of Nations Installation Problem

[Ken and Jane Becker]

OK. So, my son has this nice copy of Rise of Nations. Early last year it
installed just fine on the computer that he and my daughter used and he
played lots of games on it.

Then we had three different disasters:
1) Hard drive died. So, reformat, reinstall everything, including RoN.
The game worked, I think.
2) dvd-burner died. Uninstalling software, reinstalling software,
nothing worked. Went out and got a new drive from Sony. Could burn
DVD/CD's. Installed stuff, everything seemed to work.
2) The video card died. Really. But not before the random hangs and all
that seriously corrupted the hard drive. ANOTHER reformat and reinstall
after replacing the video card.

OK. Now, stick in the RoN CD. The disk spins up, there's an hourglass on
the screen, the disk spins down, stop. No install. Run the install from
Windows Explorer or command prompt: Same result. No error messages, nothing.

Stick the CD in the upstairs computer or my work portable: No problems,
the CD install starts right up. Not that I let it complete, the
downstairs computer 2X faster than the upstairs, and the work computer
doesn't have the video speed. Besides, I'm not playing this thing at work.

Take the CD-RW drive out of the upstairs computer, install it into the
downstairs computer. Try to install with >that<. Disk spins up,
hourglass appears, hourglass goes away, disk spins down: Silent failure
of the install.

I have spent 'way too much time searching the internet and Microsoft's
web site. Went through every step I could think of, including booting up
in Safe Mode and trying it there. Disk spins up, disk spins down, nothing.

Every other game he's got (and he's got lots: Halo, Neverwinter nights,
etc.) install just fine. It's just >this< game.

Latest was that I found out that the DRM comes from Macromedia. There
was a bug report from 2005 or something that said that if one was
running an Audigy 2 and there was a splash screen, that would interfere
with the DRM. What I've got is an Audigy, not an Audigy 2, but went to
Creative and got the latest drivers anyway. Half an hour later: The
drive spins up, the drive spins down, no install. Not even a splash screen.

OK: What >IS< it with this game? Anybody got any words of wisdom? Is it
the DRM software or what?

I just don't like spending $35 to hear some microsoftie drone through a
script. The computer's a Gateway. From 2003, but it seems to run just
fine with everything else.

The "failing" hard drive is in the computer as an "E" drive, but the
Windows installation on it is gone.

Help?

Ken Becker

 

[Davej]

OK. So, my son has this nice copy of Rise of Nations. Early last year it
installed just fine on the computer that he and my daughter used and he
played lots of games on it.
[...]

This sort of thing used to be what would happen if the registry still
contained entries that a proper uninstall would have removed. You
might need to clean these out of the registry.

 

[Mavityre]

I have exactly the same problem

What did you do to fix it?

What apian, I've tried everything.

Thanks

 

[joplju]

I've had the exact same problem. I've never gotten it installed in the first place, so there is no registry. What did you do to fix it?

 

[Mavityre]

Got it to work.

Clean the disk real good. I noticed a few smudges and that seemed to be the problem. I noticed some flickering too but determined that it's because the machine is too hot. I run a fan blowing on the video card and that fixed that too.

Good luck.

 

[joplju]

No, it was a brand new disk. The problem was that it needed to be installed in Windows 98 mode... It's solved now, though.