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TR1 with no CD: possible?

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First post, by laracroft.net

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Hi.

I have a SoldOut copy of TR1 which I would like to play on my laptop (Dell Latitude with WinXP Pro SP2).

My problem is that the CD/DVD-ROM drive of this particular laptop does not work ("Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)" -so there is no drive letter assigned to it), so that although I have been able to install the game on the HDD by copying the contents of the CD-ROM onto it through a USB key, I cannot run it - "Please insert CD", of course -or, in the case of Glidos, "CD not present".

I have tried many things (like supposedly noCD patches), with never any success. I have notably tried installing virtual-drive programmes such as Deamon Tools, but the problem there is that these programmes seem to require the presence of a real CD-ROM drive before they can create a virtual one.

So I would like to know if anyone knows a way of bypassing the missing CD-ROM drive (short of buying an external one), whether through a patch or other means.

Thanks in advance for your replies.

"I'm not interrupting, am I?" -Lara Croft, Tomb Raider - Adventures of Lara Croft

Reply 1 of 2, by ratfink

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This may nothelp with XP, but for what it's worth...

... I had a Thinkpad 701CS, which doesn't have a CD drive and only has parallel and serial ports. Installing an OS is a pain - I installed Win95 through floppies but managed to create a partition and copy the Win NT4 CD to that, across a network.

There was a file on the NT4 CD which seemed to make Win95 believe the parition was a CD [called "Winnt40" or some such]. The interesting bit is that I also copied the Warcraft 1 CD files to this partition [from a legit copy, again across network] and that game would then run [it normally needs a CD].

Even weirder, when you clicked to explore the partition, the Nt4 autorun would execute.

I never tried this on anything else.

Reply 2 of 2, by laracroft.net

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Hi!

Thanks for the reply!

I'll have to ask a friend who knows his way better than me around computers whether he can dig up the file you mention under XP.

(BTW, the problem of reformating and reinstalling without a CD drive is indeed a big one! I'll have to try and do it via network also, but I'm not quite sure how to do that!)

"I'm not interrupting, am I?" -Lara Croft, Tomb Raider - Adventures of Lara Croft

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