Listen Idk a lot about computers, but I need Help

[RiseAgainst]

Listen, I've been playing TA for a long time. And I just found my old cd case with it in there. I have the Core Contingency add-ons and stuff, but thats besides the point. I keep trying to install the game but it keeps telling me
"Install Failed!
Unable to write to C:\Cavedog\TOTALA\totala1.hpi."
I dont know but its getting me really frustrated. How can I fix it? It is a real game disc, so I dont know whats going, provided the game is old and has been through some rough times but it was fine when I put it away like last year. Idk, can someone help?

[zuzuf]

Hi,

it seems it's an error about writing stuffs to the hard drive not reading from the cd. Maybe the write access to C:\Cavedog\TOTALA\ is restricted and changing this could solve the problem.

What OS do you use ? since TA is old it might need some tweaks depending on the OS.

If it still doesn't work you can also try to extract this file with an HPIViewer or by installing TA3D (the install.bat script will ask you for the CD, and will extract the totala1.hpi & totala2.hpi files)

[RiseAgainst]

Okay, my OS is Windows XP. So, I gotta just maybe download TA 3D and it might work? And how do I change the "write access"

[zuzuf]

to change write access rights: right click on the C:\Cavedog\TOTALA\ directory -> properties, you should have something like a checkbox entitled "read only".

I might be wrong since I haven't been using windows for many years now.

[Doors]

[quote="RiseAgainst"]Listen, I've been playing TA for a long time. And I just found my old cd case with it in there. I have the Core Contingency add-ons and stuff, but thats besides the point. I keep trying to install the game but it keeps telling me
"Install Failed!
Unable to write to C:\Cavedog\TOTALA\totala1.hpi."
I dont know but its getting me really frustrated. How can I fix it? It is a real game disc, so I dont know whats going, provided the game is old and has been through some rough times but it was fine when I put it away like last year. Idk, can someone help?[/quote]

Hi,

The first thing to do make sure you are logged into XP as an administrator account type or at least power user.

The second thing to do is try just copying all the files off the CD to make sure that they can be read at all. Though you can use explorer for this I use Ztree myself. The reason for this is that although windows is saying that it can't write to a directory on the C drive it could also mean that there is a problem reading the CD and write behind caching has taken the read and write notifications out of sync.

The idgit who designed the MS write behind caching algorithm didn't think about anything except a corporate setup so it gets a little funny if there are to many things going on. IE - you have a lot of little tasks running or lots of things beside your clock. IN XP you will have to choose to expand it since MS decided that users don't need to know what is going on in there own computer.

Anyway make sure that you can read the discs properly and if that doesn't fix it then you may have to do an install in compatibility mode. I run 2K so I can't tell you exactly how to do that immediately. If you need to do that I can look it up though.

goto http://www.annoyances.org for lots of interesting things you can do with or to windows.

When you go to run the game you will get a DirectX error, don't panic it's just because TA checks for the exact Directx that comes on the CD. Any newer version will work just fine even though the fake error message comes up every time.

I run mine under Win2K W/Dx 9.0c with out any problem.