Home › Forums › Locomotive Engineers

"write error" 0kb needed for install

Ben's picture
Tue, 11/12/2013 - 12:36 — Ben

Hi all,

I'm trying to install a KnP game (onto Win 3.11 through DOSBox) from a set of twenty-year-old floppy disks. The files on disk 1 appear to be as expected (game.dat 1.387kb, setup.bin 4kb and setup.exe 31kb), but in Win 3.11 the installer window tells me that 0kb are needed for install, and when I try the install, it tells me there is a write error.

I guess the install file is corrupted, but I wanted to check if this is a known issue with a workaround, or if anyone can suggest anything else before I consign the game to the toilet of history.

Thanks!

‹ Newbie DreamZZT: An open-source ZZT engine for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Nintendo DS and the SEGA Dreamcast. ›
Tue, 11/12/2013 - 13:54 — snapman
snapman's picture

0kb needed, 524288000kb available?

It could be that DosBox is trying to install to a drive that has so much free space available that the installer gets confused and says there's not enough room? Try making a mountable/writeable 500mb drive image and install to that?

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 00:40 — Ben
Ben's picture

I forgot to mention - other

I forgot to mention - other KnP games are installing fine using the exact same method.

This is worth a try, though. I've already got c:\doswin mounted as c:\ in DOSBox. How do I work with that set up to do what you suggest?

Thanks!

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 01:36 — snapman
snapman's picture

Cursory googling

Cursory googling says you'd need to use the IMGMOUNT command to mount an image made using the bximage program from Bochs. Further googling indicates that's actually more complex than it sounds. Relevant links:

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/IMGMOUNT#Hard_disk_images
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

Though it looks like Bochs has some pre-made disk images ready for download, so if the game is smaller than 10MB, you could just grab the FreeDOS image here, and format it from within dosbox?
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/diskimages.html

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 12:40 — Ben
Ben's picture

Nice one, thanks! I'll take

Nice one, thanks!

I'll take a look at all that. I still think it's probably just a corrupted installer, but I'm willing to hope otherwise!