It has been a while since Dragon Age first appeared on the market. My wife have been playing off and on since the release, and we are close to completing the game, definitely within the last 25%. To make a long and frustrating story short, I managed to destroy our operating system installation accidentally one dark and stormy night (NTFS file system gone, EXT3 in it’s place with additional files installed on top for good measure), on the very drive which held our Dragon Age and Fallout 3 games. Two very long games, so no small amount of investment. Obviously, there was much drama and hand waving.

Long story short (didn’t we already do this part?), I recovered most of the save game files, reinstalled the operating system (Windows 7, 64-bit), and installed all of those nasty dependencies. Now, I was ready to install the game. I gingerly placed my Dragon Age game disc in the DvD drive, ran the auto-installer, and… whammo! A big ol’ data read error in my face. Now isn’t that just great. Insolent hardware! I went through this process several times later (copying contents from the disc to the hard drive, disabling the Data Execution Prevention for the installer, etc.), and to make a long story short, had no success with the same error appearing in seemingly random locations during the install. However there is a silver lining, and I eventually did manage to get a fully functional installation. Would you like to know how?

SCRATCH HERE TO REVEAL SECRET

I simply copied the disc’s contents from another machine’s DvD drive (an iMac in this case) to my Windows 7 box. Ran the installer and it worked. No fuss, no muss. Except for all of the fuss and muss I mentioned above. Please feel free to send me money if you find this helpful.

Categories: Games, PC
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