There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive D:.


I'm about to be a big nerd, bear with me.

I remember when CD-Rom's first started being a viable way to distribute computer software. And I remember thinking that was a good thing since I was tired of installations where I had to keep track of about 10-15 floppy disks (now, insert disk #12...) And they've held true to form, most software comes on one or two CD's. There have been some exceptions, Visual Studio has always required a lot of disks, and the first Balders Gate I think required four, which was a big deal at the time. But now more and more games are requiring lots of discs for their installs. I guess soon enough DVD-ROM will take off and we'll be back to one or two discs for a few years.

I'm thinking about this because I bought and installed Far Cry today, a new game. It comes on five discs! I don't really mind that so much. What I do mind is that after swapping five CD's during the install and putting a 3 gigabyte footprint on my hard drive, do you know what happens when I try to play the game? I get that freakin' quote above. I need to put the actual CD in the drive to play the game. I understand why they do it (copy protection - and yes, even though everyone I know has a burner, these CD's typically have special anti-copy measures on them) but I've always been annoyed by it.

I'm especially annoyed when a game takes up 3 GB of my hard drive after a CD swapping installathon and still expects me to insert the CD to play. It's not like there's data on that CD they need to access at run time.

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