CDs and Hard Drive Troubleshooting
This page describes how to fix various problems with the CDs and hard drive installation of Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast.
A DVD version of Baldur's Gate was released in June 1999 that has a patched version of the game. No special material is included besides what was on the 5 BG CDs. A DVD version that includes Tales of the Sword Coast was released in November 1999. If you are interested in upgrading, follow these instructions.
CD swapping should not be a major issue unless you are continually using the World Map to cross large distances. The distribution of files on the CDs has been optimized to reduce the necessity of swapping disks.
If you are playing off the CDs, a cache will be maintained for files most recently loaded. The cache size can be set to any size with the BGConfig program after installing the game. Don Yakielshek (Senior Programmer) recommends a 120-240 MB cache if you can spare the room.
A major source of assertion errors or crashes is corruption of files in the /data/cache/ directory in the Baldur's Gate folder, especially for errors that take a while to develop. Deleting all the files in that directory seems to correct the problem. These files will be automatically reloaded from the CD if they are needed again.
Problems have been reported with some CDs, especially CD3 and CD4, causing loud noises when they spin in the CD-ROM drive. Some CD-ROM drives appear to be sensitive while others are not.
If BG crashes when it is saving a game, the save game file might be lost. Therefore, do not use one save slot for the whole game. Occasionally, save the game in another slot. Baldur's Gate autosaves when you do an area transition (the top saved game slot). This autosave can be used to recover from the loss of a saved game file in some cases.
If you are playing multiplayer, you may want to keep save games from important locations so that you can set up a spontaneous adventure quickly.
You have three initial installation options: Minimum, Recommended and Custom. The Recommended is only about 100 MB more than the Minimum and includes everything but background graphics and movies. The Custom install permits you to download as many areas as you want to through a series of check boxes. A few options that are not available in the installer package can be done manually in the BALDUR.INI file as explained by Scott Grieg (Programming Director):
If you don't have the drive space on one partition,
you can copy the entire CD to another drive and
have the game pretend that it is that particular CD.
If you have multiple CD drives, you can tell the
game that you want CDs 1,3,5 on one drive and 2,4
on another.
The same thing goes if you have a network setup,
although we are finding our CD drives, faster than
our network connections.
If you experience lock ups when CD3 must be put in, try deleting your cache or putting the CD3 in the drive before making the area transition. As explained by Mark Brockington (Programmer):
Let me hypothesize. You're visiting Nashkel for the first
time in this game, but you visited Nashkel in a
previous game, so the area is in the cache on your
hard drive. So, the game asks you to put CD3 in the
drive (which you do), and then the game hangs.
We've noticed that this is a problem. The problem
is that the screen is supposed to tell you to put CD2
back in the drive temporarily, and then switch back
to CD3! However, neither of these screens appear.
Deleting the cache directory should solve the
problem and allow you
to keep going. We have fixed this problem, and any
patch that we release should allow you to see all of
the CD swapping screens.
If you have a scratched CD which does not appear to be working, return it for a replacement. For future products, a different type of CD holder will likely be used.
If upon installation you are getting an ISSET_SE or an error 105, the computer most likely has DOS CD-ROM drivers loaded. We suggest you contact your systems manufacturer to make sure that the DOS drivers are disabled and
that the Windows CD-ROM drivers are installed properly. If no real-mode dos CD-ROM drivers are loading then you will want to make sure that both the CD and the drive
have been cleaned properly.
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