Difficulty installing The 7th Guest on DOSBox

Question

I am having difficulty running a game using DOSBox. The problem begins after I begin the installation. It runs through fine, until it asks which drive I would like to copy the files to. It only shows Z, but not the mounted drive I selected (say H) for my DOS games directory.

My only choice is to select the Z drive, however it the tells me that it does not have enough space for the copies. This is ultimately the issue.

The exact error message is: "The drive you have selected does not have enough free space to install The 7th Guest. Please select another drive or exit and increase the free space on this drive".

There is also a second box on the right saying: "Space Remaining On Drive: < 5 Thousand Bytes."

Prior to that, is a screen asking me to select a drive. The only drive on the list is "Z:".

Is it possible to increase the size of the Z drive that DOSBox automatically creates? Or, is there a way of using the drive I mounted? It does not appear on the "Select Hard Drive" inside the installation.

I have considered compiling it from source, and taking a look at the code seeing if I can hack it. Of course, that is only if there is no easier solution.

I am trying to run The 7th Guest, a fantastic puzzle game. I am running DOSBox on Linux, Ubuntu 11.10 to be exact. The version of DOSBox I am running is 0.74.

Answer 1

I'm going to try to answer generally, since I don't have this game.

Some games expect you to have C:\ since probably 99% of Windows/DOS installations use that as their main drive. So try (for example):

mount C /home/user/oldgames

And then run the installer and try installing it under C.

If your path is something like /media/external then it could be that the drive is too big, and the installer thinks the drive size is a negative value or something due to integer overflow. In that case you could try making a small partition and using that instead. This is assuming DOSBox uses the max available size. You can specify a size (in MB) like so:

mount C /path/to/whatever -freesize 1024

Answer 2

Some games refuse to install to what it thinks is not a physical hard disk (like a network share, or removable media). DOSBOX mounts are faux-network shares to simplify management, but you can create a hard disk image that the game should accept as a valid destination:

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/IMGMOUNT

This allows you to mount a disk image file as a hard disk. It's a bit more complicated than simply cross-mounting your host filesystem, but once set up it's indistinguishable from a hard disk to the hosted software.