If you’re still running Windows 95 or 98, then installing Hardwar should pose no problem for you. However, gamers with Windows 2000 or XP might have a difficult time. (I should know, as I ran into problems of my own.)
When installing the game on these operating systems, you’ll get the message “Not enough free space on target drive”, even though you might have tons of free gigabytes on your hard disk. This is because Hardwar is quite an old game and can’t properly see your disk’s free space.
Windows 2000 Solution: There are three options. First, you can try the Free Disk Space Check Skipping Utility which you can find over at Mun’s Hardwar Downloads page.
The other two manual solutions are quite brutal. The first involves filling in your hard drive with other data (music files, movies, etc) until you have less than 2 GB of free space available. Just delete the ‘placeholder’ files after you install Hardwar. The second trick is to partition your disk, with the new partition sized less than 2 GB.
If you have Windows 2000 SP2 or SP3, you’re in luck — you just need to enable application compatibility-mode technology for your OS. Then, right-click on the Hardwar CD file install.exe, choose “Properties”, and turn on Windows 98 compatibility mode. That should solve the problem.
Windows XP Solution: As WinXP by default comes with application compatibility-mode technology, just right-click on the Hardwar CD file install.exe, choose “Properties”, and turn on Windows 98 compatibility mode.
However, if Windows won’t allow the changing of the CD file’s compatibility mode (that happened to me), just copy the contents of the CD (all of them!) into a folder in your hard drive, enable Win98 compatibility for the .exe file, and run it. In effect, you’re installing from your hard drive (it might sound weird, but trust me, it works).
One caveat though — DON’T delete the folder that contains the files from the CD! This is where Hardwar will get the data needed to run the game (yep, you won’t need the CD anymore).
However, hurdling the installation might not be the last of your worries, as the game might not run properly on Windows XP without some tweaking. Head over to the Video Card Problems guide for more info.
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