"Catastropic failure" when trying to install

[King Thor]

Well I put the Civ 4 CD in, and autoplay brought up a menu, so I clicked "install" and lo and behold.. It starts up Powerquest Boot Magic (WTF?!?!) and asks me to create a rescue floppy.. I dont HAVE a floppy disk drive. canceling out shuts down the install, and clicking create on a USB key drive tells me its not a floppy.

Okay.. so I find the setup.exe in the root folder of the CD and run it.. the setup screen comes up and I think I'm okay.. it starts install ing files and when ti gets to Assets/Art0.fpk it pops up an error message

Caption: "Feature Transfer error"
Feature: DefaultFeature
Component:
File:
Error: Catastrophic failure.

I've retried it 3 times, and each time I get the same error.

I have the Special Edition of Civ 4, and I'm rather upset. How would you feel when you buy a brand new car with no warranty, turn the key in the ignition and the radiator busts a leak. I'm sorry to say, even though I was so excited to get my hands on this game, its made a very bad first impression on me.

My system :
P4 3.0Ghz, 1.5GB Ram, 8GB free HDD space, Win XP Home, SP2.

I will greatly appreciate any help, anyone can give me.

[seebs]

Something is very wrong with your system. Do you even run BootMagic normally? I can't think of anything on that disk that could do this, unless some piece of malware is trying to cleverly help you run the wrong program.

You may be about due for backups and a fresh install.

[King Thor]

I have powerquest partition magic installed, not bootmagic though.. however, I dont think that is connected with the catastropic failure though.. powerquest boot magic doesn't come up for ANYTHING else. I dont think this system is messed up. its barely 2 months old, I am a computer geek and know my way around computers thats all. Why would the game care how my system boots up? I have a dual boot system BTW, with GRUB and Linux.

[King Thor]

great.. after rebooting the system it always dies on intro.bik.

Could the problem be that I'm installing over an IDE DVD-RW drive that is in an external enclosure and connected to the system via USB?

Its never given me trouble before!

[seebs]

I don't think the game cares, that's my point. It never did anything even a tiny bit like this for me, which makes me suspect that some agency other than the game itself is causing the autorun to run the wrong program when it tries to install.

I don't think it should matter that you're using an external/USB drive, but it might. Do you have any other drives you could try with? Or, in particular, do you have drive emulation software you could use for the install?

[King Thor]

Well I opened up my system and installed an extra internal IDE drive, and tried again. this time it went through flawlessly (the powerquest bootmagic thing still pops up though)

Now if only I can get the game to start. lol.. its a struggle every step of the way!

[TomVeil]

I don't get the Powerquest thing, but about 2/3 of the way into my installation (after a series of CRC errors), I also get the "Catastrophic failure" message. I was thinking that Catastrophic failure may be related to the CRC problems, which are usually the sign of a poorly made or scratched CD.