4. Morrowind "No CD" Patch

As of the 1st Official Morrowind Patch, it seems Bethesda have removed the Macrovision Safedisc protection system from Morrowind, hence providing some performance improvement without needing any No CD patches. However they’ve retained the simple CD check, which checks to make sure you have the Morrowind CD in the drive while playing. Now I’m against piracy and I urge you to buy Morrowind and not play using a pirated copy. (Ed note. TweakTown does not endorse pirated or cracked software – Go out and buy the game.) However the CD check is annoying and I much prefer to put my original Morrowind CD safely away and play without it in the drive.

If you have previously used a No CD patch or hack of any kind for Morrowind, before patching, make sure you have replaced the original Morrowind.exe and/or Morrowind Launcher.exe files in your Morrowind directory, and the cracked versions are removed. If necessary, you may have to reinstall Morrowind (follow procedures in 1 above for uninstalling/reinstall Morrowind) if you don’t have the original .exe files anymore. The patch won't work properly on the cracked versions, and even if it does, you may run into problems later on.

If you have a fresh install of Morrowind, or you’re sure that all the original Morrowind files are there, and you’ve installed the latest official Morrowind Patch, then:

1. Go to either the Morrowind, Tribunal or Bloodmoon sections of Megagames, or the GameFix Morrowind section. Note the patch may be in a compressed .ace or .rar file, in which case go to WinAce or WinRAR and download the latest version of these free utilities to extract it.

2. Once extracted, you’ll typically find a Morrowind.exe file which has been modified to remove the CD check from Morrowind. Go to the \Morrowind directory and rename the original Morrowind.exe file to something like Morrowind.RealExe, and copy the new "No-CD" Morrowind.exe file into the same directory.

3. Next, copy the VIDEO directory and its entire contents from your Morrowind CD to under your \Morrowind directory. This is necessary otherwise you may get errors on startup.

Once this is done you can now run Morrowind exactly as if you had the CD in the drive, but without the annoyance.

Alternatively, if you can't find a No-CD EXE file for your version of Morrowind from one of the sites above, you can try this general method which should work for all versions:

1. Download this Generic Morrowind No-CD Patcher and extract the contents to an empty directory.

2. Copy your Morrowind.exe from the \Morrowind directory into the same directory where you extracted the No-CD patch. Leave the original Morrowind.exe in the \Morrowind directory, but rename it (e.g. Morrowind.REALExe) and keep it as a backup.

3. Run the Runme.bat file and it will patch the copy of Morrowind.exe you've placed in the same directory. It will now be called mw.exe. Rename it back to Morrowind.exe, and place it in the \Morrowind directory.

4. Make sure you copy the VIDEO directory and its entire contents from your Morrowind CD to under your \Morrowind directory. This is necessary otherwise you may get errors on startup. Alternatively you can use the VIDEO directory which comes with the No-CD patch, and which contains the relevant files to avoid errors (but no movies).

You should now be able to run Morrowind without the CD, and the above method should work for all versions of Morrowind.



If you want to play a game then pay for it, or go without, but there’s no excuse for pirating a game as great as Morrowind.








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