About 5 days ago, I formatted and reinstalled Windows 98: Second Edition on my computer. The day before yesterday, I bought Half-Life, since my friend wanted his Half-Life CD back. When I was installing it again, and when I get about 1/3 through in the installation, I get an I/O Error when it reaches the file pak0.pak. The exact error I get is: "An I/O error occured while installing a file. This is normally caused by bad installation media or a corrupt installation file." Now, I don't think it's a CD problem, because I traded it in for different copies about three times. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Thanks! ^_^

My first thought was naturally bad disk, but you say you've tried three different ones? Have you tried your friend's disk? If it used to work and now it doesn't, you can narrow down the possibilities. Otherwise, I can't think of anything other than contacting the manufacturer. A popular product like that should have e-mail support from their website.

You could try to copy all of the installation files to your hard drive then run setup from there. Make sure nothing else is running when you install it. You could also try a different CD-ROM drive.

I've e-mailed Sierra twice about my problem, and I still haven't got any word back. I've also posted on their technical support board, but there's no answer in solving the problem. I've tried installing from my CD Burner and it's the same thing as my primary CD Drive. Installing from the hard drive gives me the same thing. Lastly, I've tried to do the installation where I don't run any programs other than Explorer and Systray, and I get the same thing too! Ugh... I have no idea what's going on. Is there anything else I can do?

Copy all of the installation files to your hard drive, then boot into safe mode. When you are in safe mode, try to run setup from your hard drive. Do you have another PC? Try installing it on another machine to make sure the CD is good. You could also try installing from another computer over a network. Or you could just re-format and try again!

Sierra has one of the weakest and lamest tech supports. They must have the cast offs from A_L! Remember, Sierra is just like a publishing company where they use their name and make money off other people's work. The real experts are those that wrote it or those that use it daily and tweak everything. The biggest forum that I have found is www.counter-strike.net. -It's been a problem with Half-Life that serveral brands of cd makers are incompatible with HL. These are listed in the readme. Check your friends version see if they match. There is a patch (after installation Hah!) to fix the problem. (Catch 22?) -Did you uninstall your friends version of HL before installing the new one? There have been soooooo many patches that it would present a problem. (I 'liked' the patch where it fixed one small problem but created another where some guns shot backwards! Where were the beta testers?) To play online you will need: HL1109 (80MB I think) and to play sounter-strike csv14full (118MB) Hope this helps.....ck

when i try to instal halflife with the setup file it says d:/SETUP.EXE is not a valid win32 application what do i do is there another installation folder and where