Hello, I recently purchased a new notebook & external disc drive. The main reason I purchased them was for some retro gaming. The problem I havr is the disc drive seems to be very selective in what procedures it wants to undertake. Some games install off the disc fine but others won't allow me to enter the installation screen. My question is: If I were to install said games onto my desktop and then using a USB stick (being as they would be very small file-sized games) could I then transfer them onto my notebook and run them that way? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
usually transferring files like that doesn't work unless you copy over the correct registry keys too. on the notebook, are you running windows 7? it can have lots of issues with older games, that may be why you are having trouble installing games.
No, I'm currently running XP service pack 3. I tried moving the files onto a CD and then transferfering them to the notebook, and although it did move all the file contents onto the hard-drive, it would'nt allow me to run the program as it said their were certain files missing.
It would do that, when the program installs, it makes a whole lot of entries into the system registry; you can copy the files but unless you copy the registry entries too, the program won't know where to find all its files. Have you tried copying the contents of the CD over and installing it from the Hard drive? Some older games would allow you just to select all the files on the disk, copy them to HDD, and run the installation from there. Otherwise, you could try creating an ISO.
Yeah I tried installing from the hard drive and the .exe file would'nt respond. What do you mean by 'creating an ISO' ?.
a little bit of the long way around might work. Make your CD drive on the desktop available to your network, then access the CDrom on the desktop from the laptop. Run the installer on the laptop, but from the desktop. It will take quite abit longer to install this way though. But it's free! Another option wouldd be to buy a different external USB or eSATA CDrom for the laptop. A decent midrange one will read/write everything you want. But it costs money. installing and transferring file by USB rarely works, unless the games were produced before 1999. And then you'll have trouble running them without OS emulaton. Lee
Thanks for all the help, but I've discovered the root of all my problems. The external disc drive came with 2 USB connecters, so naturally I was plugging both in whenever I wanted to use it. This morning (for no apparent reason) I tried just plugging one of the USB ports in and it's working fine. It seems to be reading every disc I own. Has anyone else experienced something like this or is it a common problem?.
