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British Birds from the hard drive

To avoid the need to change disks, if you have one of our multi-disk sets, you can copy the disk/s to the hard drive. We cannot support copying the whole program to the hard drive - just the second disk of the British set and disks 2-6 of the European set. This is mainly due to copyright and piracy issues. For the Guide to British Birds see below. For All the Birds of Europe click here.

Installing Disk 2 of The CD-ROM Guide to British Birds Version 6 or 7 to run from a hard drive.

This process requires a working knowledge of files, directories and drives, and the use of Windows Explorer and a text editor. You will need around 600MB of free space on your hard disk. Allow up to half an hour to complete the process.

  1. Double-click the My Computer icon on your Windows desktop.
  2. Double-click the hard disk on which you want to install the program, and create a new folder called DISK2.
  3. Insert Disk 2 in your CD-ROM drive and copy the entire contents of the disk into the folder. This takes about ten minutes.
  4. Insert Disk 1 in the CD-ROM drive and run the SETUP.EXE program to install the BirdGuides program.
  5. Once the product is installed, browse to where the CD-ROM is installed (usually C:\Program files\BirdGuides\British Birds, unless you chose to install to a different directory).
  6. In this folder you should find a file called BIRDS.INI (you will need to set your computer so that you can see the file extensions) - double-click to open it (usually in Windows Notepad, but this depends on how your system is set up).
  7. You will see two lines below the [Birds] heading reading something like:

    CD01=D:
    CD02=D: (If your CD-ROM drive is not drive D, a different letter will appear.)

    Change the second of these lines to read:

    CD02=C:\DISK2 (If your hard drive is not drive C:, change the letter as appropriate).
  8. Select File, Save to save the file.
  9. Select File, Exit to close the text editor program.
  10. Close down My Computer.

Now run the BirdGuides program by clicking on Start, Programs, BirdGuides, British Birds, British Birds Version 6.0/7.0. To run the BirdGuides program, you will still need to insert Disk 1 in the CD-ROM drive, but you should not have to replace it with Disk 2 when you want to run videos or hear sounds of species from that disk, as the program will find the files in the folder on your hard drive.