Hey,
when I'm starting the game an errorscreen comes up saying "please insert the game disc". Any solution for this?
My hardware is a standard Sony VAIO VPCW11S1E with Windows 7.

Did you ever have a retail version of this game installed on that computer before hand? Also does that computer have a disc drive?

No, I don't have an optical drive (because it's a netbook) and no I haven't installed I-War2 before. Any other idea?

The fact that you don't have an optical drive is exactly the cause of the problem I'm afraid.
Just tested it by disabling my DVD drive in the device manager and got the same error message as you got when I started the game.
Seems that despite the GOG version of the game not needing the original CDs in any way, it still does some sort of check for an optical drive.
The only solution I've been able to come up with is installing Daemon Tools or something similar, as that creates a virtual optical drive which is sufficient for the game to load up normally.

OK, so I have this problem as well. I see where Daemon Lite has solved this for others. I downloaded and installed Daemon but have no idea what to do next. I tried searching the game files for some kind of image to load but can't find anything. can someone walk me through what exactly I'm supposed to be doing? Thanks

Also to note, i have an EXTERNAL disc drive via USB, if that makes any difference

You don't need to load up the game files in daemon tools, just create a fake disc drive. If that doesn't work try a combination of things like removing your external drive and running just with daemon tools. Or if you didn't have your external plugged in when trying to run the game, plug that in and see if it will work.

I can confirm this. I had the same problem, then I plugged in my external DVD drive and EoC stopped asking for a disc.

Works like charm now. I have something to play while waiting for Elite: Dangerous!

Thank you Hamsfarthing and others!

Bit of an Old topic. But I'll add to this.

I had same problem on Windows 8.1 pro

Solution I've got running is as follows.
I downloaded Core Linux iso
It actually doesn't seem to matter which image you use. I tried it out with Battlezone 2 iso image that i made from disc. Basically it seems that GoG's patch for I-War 2 requires a disk to be present in a CD/DVD drive or a virtual drive.

anyways, once you have an iso you can create a .bat file
with following commands in it

powershell Mount-DiskImage -ImagePath "D:\Games\'Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos'\Core-current.iso"
call "D:\Games\Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos\bin\release\loader.exe" -ac iwar2.icGame -dl 3
powershell Dismount-DiskImage -ImagePath "D:\Games\'Independence War 2 - Edge of Chaos'\Core-current.iso"


basically this .bat file, will mount the ISO, start the game, and when you exit the game, it unmounts the iso.
the path to iso in my case is "d:\games\independence war 2 - edge of chaos ", you will need to replace that with where ever you installed the game.
ALSO Mount-DiskImage command has a bug where by it doesn't like paths with spaces and dashes, which is why in my example i-war specific folder is between single quotes, with whole path in-between double quotes.

For the above method, since any .iso will do, you can just make one from an empty .txt file with ImgBurn or the like.

This also may or may not work, but Western Digital portable external hard drives with encryption enabled will mount a virtual CD-ROM with a decryption program on it.

Great approach, which doesn't require additional tools and worked for me in Windows 10 in 2022.

Mounting any arbitrary ISO from another game as a virtual optical drive fixed (removed) the "Please Insert Game Disk" prompt.