Are you mounting something as your virtual C: drive that the installer can write to? It's not trying to write to the CD is it?

It sounds like it's trying to write a configuration file somewhere, but can't.

im not trying to write anything. at least not on purpose. all i do is run the INSTALL in dos box and when i try to start the installation it gives me that message. i dont understand.

Garret - where (which path, which directory) do you want to install the game?

Did you try running the install.exe in windows' command prompt? If it installs in windows you can then play it in dosbox (just remember to run the dos install not the setup.exe for windows)

Quite a few of the Sierra (and a few other companies) games will try to install onto the cd if it isn't mounted in dosbox as a cdrom. (actually a bit of a nice feature as you can just copy the files from the cd onto the hard drive and usually run it quite easily then)

You should probably make sure to type something along the lines of:

mount [drive letter to mount to] [where drive actually is mounted] -t cdrom

(Probably wouldn't hurt to look through the README for some other options if need be)

So for example if your cd drive is G: and you want to mount it as d:-

mount d g:\ -t cdrom

(you may have to use other options as well in Windows. I don't use it so I wouldn't know)