Hey everyone. Long time lurker on GOG, I finally made the plunge and picked up Might & Magic 1-6 and Descent 1/2. Loving the games so far, except that I can't seem to get Descent 2 started.

I am running Linux, so I installed the games into my DOSBox directory and run native DOSBox to start the games. All the MM games and Descent 1 work fine, but with Descent 2 I get the titular error. Same thing if I try to run setup.exe.

Seems weird that would require a CD or not come with some sort of patch. I've been looking on here and Google with no luck so far, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knew the likely-obvious solution I'm missing.

Thank you.

Thanks for the reply. As an Arch user, I found Rebirth for both games on the AUR and tried it out this morning. Awesome!

I know it's a bit necrothreading, as it's the end of 2016 now, but this post still comes as the first result when searching for this problem.
I was able to solve it without installing external programs. Actually, Descent 2 in the GOG version still uses a CD image - it's in the CUE-BIN format (these files are renamed to .inst and .gog respectively: DESCENT_II.inst and DESCENT_II.gog).
After running Dosbox, you have to mount them first somewhere, for example on the D drive:

C:\> imgmount D DESCENT_II.inst -t iso

Then run DESCENT2.EXE and it shouldn't complain now. Of course it's convenient to embed it in some kind of script or batch file to save your finger muscles. ;-)
If you grep for "imgmount" in the game's folder, you'll actually see that this is the solution used by the GOG team (in several dosboxDescent2*.conf files).