After trying several times to install the game, I admitted defeat to a particular little box that has been pissing me off for a month. It says 'please insert disk5'.
Since when has their been five disks to Baldur's Gate II? I am sure there is only four!
You are right. There's only 4. The fifth would be Throne of Bhaal.
Have you tried to pop in the first disk when it asks for disk 5?
Have you ever installed Throne of Bhaal?
Edit: BAH! Nothing to do, so....
The "Insert Disc 5" problem occurs when the installer has had trouble reading one of the files on a previous CD, and so assumes there must be another disk with the relevant file on it. There are a number of steps you can take which may fix this problem and allow you to install properly.
1. When changing CDs during the installation, let the drive spin-up and then stop. Then click OK and see if the installer recognizes the disc change. Do this for all the CDs that are requested.
2.Try checking for a firmware/BIOS update for your CD or DVD drive.
3. If you have multiple CD/DVD drives, only install from one and do not try to use all of your drives. For some reason, this is confusing InstallShield.
If those do not work, then gimme me a hint and I'll check if there's another solution.
OOC: Is Baldur's Gate II any good? I like NWN.
OOC: I loved BG II. While not as good as Planescape: Torment, IMHO, it's still one of my favorite games, for sure. Having not played NWN I'm not sure about this, but it's my understanding that NWN is more of a hack-slash game than BG II, which is more plot-driven. On a side note, you don't really have to have played BG original to play BG II.
OOC: The Baldur's Gate series is very good. It's a good mix between IceWind Dale and Planescape: Torment. NWN is also very good, although I dislike the mercenary thingy. Somehow it seems too shallow compared to BG. It's also pretty sad that you're only allowed to hire one mercenary at a time. But what the hey. The games' strong side is the multiplayer part.
Continued:
4. If you cannot do any install without getting some sort of error or crash and you have about 5 Gig of free hard drive space, you can try to copy all 4 CDs to your hard drive, then run the install from there. Note, you must copy all 4 CDs to the same directory for the install to run. If you get prompted for the next CD, then you have not copied the files over properly, or you have missed some.
6. Try turning off DMA for your CD/DVD drive. You can find this checkbox by going to your Control Panel, then to System, then to the Device Manager tab. Find your CD/DVD drive and bring up its Properties, then go to the Settings tab.
After it's asked you for disc 5 insert disc 1 in and it should work, that's what I did.
OOC: I've never played all through BG:II, but from what I've played it is an excellent game. Planscape: Torment is the best though, in that type of genre. I haven't played NWN yet and I don't plan on paying $50 for a game.
BTW has anybody tried to burn NWN and does it work?
OOC: Yeah, the BG series fscking owns. I'm re-playing BG1 before I proceed onto BG2 again.