I've tried support twice for this but I've received no response so far. I'm hoping the community can help out!

Whenever I start I-War 2 it displays the prompt "PLEASE INSERT PLAY DISK" in the centre of the screen, with a cancel button underneath. I can get to the main menu by clicking the cancel button, however the only menu options that then appear are MULTIPLAYER, OPTIONS, CREDITS and QUIT. The START NEW GAME and LOAD GAME options do not appear.

Why is the game prompting me for a play disk, and why am I unable to start a single player game?

FYI - I-War 2 downloaded and installed fine, there were no problems with the file integrity check. The MULTIPLAYER option works ok, I can host a LAN game and fly a ship around perfectly fine.

Try setting the loader.exe to XP compatibility.

Also check to see that DEP (Data Execution Protection) is only turned on for essential windows services.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm running this under Windows XP anyway. Wahey! I've no idea why, but running the game with a virtual drive enabled got it running, thanks Ralackk!

Same problem, same solution. Odd, since I have an optical drive and am using GOGs executable. Oh well, runs now without my CD. Thanks, folks.

I'm no genius on the mount / unmount thing so I had DT make an image of the disk 2 "play" CD and assigned it to a virtual drive.

Just so others know, can you give more detail on how you got it to work?

Damn. So I need a virtual drive in order to play the campaign? :-(

Creating a virtual drive with PowerISO did it, but it's ridiculous that this wasn't patched before GOG sold it.

I am having the same problem trying to run the game in Wine. I don't understand - what do you target the virtual drive to if you only have the GOG version and no disk images?

Edit: for the curious, this issue is fixed by creating a D: drive in wine. It doesn't seem to require the iwar2 discs, my drive had a random DVD in it and the check passed. However loader.exe crashes immediately upon selecting start new game, so it seems unlikely that this game will function in wine or crossover for the time being.

Installing daemon tools lite did it for me. I installed EoC on a netbook , windows 7 and encountered memtioned problem (insert play disk), triedf irst in vain the other solutions (xp-compatibility, DEP only essential windows)
Installing daemon tools lite (http://www.disc-tools.com/download/daemon) with default settings (1 virtual cd-drive) solved the problem.

I've encountered the same problem but am using crossover on a mac to play the game. I've no idea about about how to do this. Any chance you could talk me through it as if you were talking to a child monkey?!

Thanks

Oooh oooh ahh ahh!

On a more serious note, is cross over a program that emulates windows on mac? Have you tried downloading and installing demon tools from the link above that esraven provided? I believe once its installed its just a simple case of right clicking it in the task bar and setting it to mount a cd drive.

You need to create an emulated cd-rom drive in winecfg. Just point it to any valid directory or mountpoint and things will work. I had an outdated path in there and got the error msg as well, fixing that did the trick. HTH

Just tried to solve this with Daemon Tools Lite:

Game starts without the CD in drive, so I know it's playing from Daemon Tools Lite, but error message still occurs. Any suggestions for other solutions (or glaring mistakes I may have made?)

OK, so I have this problem as well. I see where Daemon Lite has solved this for others. I downloaded and installed Daemon but have no idea what to do next. I tried searching the game files for some kind of image to load but can't find anything. can someone walk me through what exactly I'm supposed to be doing? Thanks

To the guy above: just installing Daemon Tools should create a new virtual drive, which will resolve the issue.

I ran into this silly issue myself when installing EOC on a new PC that I haven't put an optical drive on yet. I used Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive instead, and it worked fine.

I did try Daemon Tools Lite, and it also worked, but I really don't like the bundled adware (though you can opt out) and the apparent online activation it does during installation.