Hi,

I have just installed fallout 3 on win7-64 home premium, after starting either from the launcher or directly from .exe I get a message "cannot locate the DVD-ROM", however the original disc is present. I am running the software as admin and also tried setting compatibility mode to vista. This same disc used to work fine on my previous system with Win XP.

Patch 1.7 is is installed.

My system is: i2500/8GB/ASUS nvidia 550Ti

Is there a solution for this problem?, thanks!

Do you have more than one optical drive available? Can you move the disk to a second one? There is a snippet of code licensed from Sony, a disk-checking routine used by SecureROM, that simply works poorly in drives with "write" capability. I had to install across my LAN when my DVD Burner wouldn't even recognize that there was anything on the disk. After that, I had no trouble. Other people have no install trouble, but get the response you got when trying to actually run the game. You may need to run some searches of the archives -- it was a very common complaint when the game was new. I seem to recall that SecureROM even had a special copy of the disk-checker that they offered to replace the one from the DVD (that had been installed with the game).

Thanks for taking the timer to reply. I have one DVD-RW drive installed, the drive is a new Liteon. I have confirmed that when replacing the new Liteon with the old Samsung DVD-RW which ran the game with no problems on the old XP system also produces the mentioned error. The drives just seek around and then the popup window with the error is shown.I searched the forum for "cannot locate the DVD-ROM" before posting, this returned no results but maybe i searched only the fallout 3 PC issues forum, will retry.Thanks again!

You could always try to run the game by opening the fallout3.exe file since the dvd check is only present in the launcher exe.

I have launched it both from fallout3.exe and the launcher, it throws out exactly the same error

That's odd, are you running any mods or unofficial patches?

You could try to re-install the game and see if it solves the problem.

I have only the official patch downloaded from the fallout website ( UK patch version, since i'm in the EU ). I have reinstalled the game already, first installation went fine but i had no entries in the windows start menu at all AND it did not work when i tried to launch it from the install directory ( same error i mention ) , the other time it installed correctly, but still the same problem.

I guess i can try again

Incidentally, I see that you have an Asus brand video card. Do not use either "Gamer OSD" or something "Doctor" that Asus adds to its driver disks. Both of them can create conflicts for these Bethesda games.

None of that, I only have installed the latest drivers from nvidia straight after installing win7. Clean install, not on top of the ASUS ones.

I do not know if this is at all relevant, but i have downloaded the SecuROM diagnostic tool, and after the scan it claims I have no applications using SecuROM(?!) I tried the automatic scan and also manually pointing it to the installation directory.

A positive update on the issue. I have reinstalled (using setup.exe as Falloutlauncher.exe also produces the cannot locate DVD-ROM error), but this time allowed the installer to install to the default location which is C:\Program Files (x86)\Bethesda Softworks\Fallout 3 instead of what I used before E:\Games\Fallout3 and applied patch 1.7
I ended up without start menu entries for the game, however the game starts up normally both from Launcher and the Fallout3.exe

The only different thing i have done is to just leave the location alone.

Thanks everyone for your time and suggestions!