Help installing Freespace 2?

[Adretator]

So it seems it's impossible for me to install FreeSpace 2. As far as I can see, to use any of the FreeSpace Open installers, you need to have Freespace already, right?

Unfortunately, all of the links everywhere are broken. The discs are just impossible to find. But after quite a while of searching I did manage to find one place that had them. But, when I mounted the images, and tried to run setup.exe, I got an error message.

Title: 16 bit Windows Subsystem
Content: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG.NT . The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows applications. Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.
Options: Close | Ignore

Ignore does nothing, close, obviously, terminates the program. Even in Win 95 compatibility mode. I'm running Windows XP, and I've seen many reports that FreeSpace 2 works on it, and even Vista, so why do I get this error? What am I doing wrong here?

[Turey]

The Installer in my sig does not need FreeSpace 2 installed to work.

[karajorma]

You're not doing anything wrong. MS are.

This is actually a windows problem that affects some older games. Most people have solved it by simply copying the autoexec.nt file from C:\WINDOWS\repair to C:\WINDOWS\system32. If that doesn't work you can find the MS Knowledge Base article on the problem here (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324767)

That advice is for Windows XP not Vista but given that they are both NT based I suspect the problem and solution are the same.

Turey's installer is a great program if you can't do such a simple fix but if you can you'll save yourself a great deal of time downloading if you simply install using the CDs and then use Turey's installer to update.