If you have more than one CD/DVD ROM, load 2 discs at a time
Upon observing the behavior of the HD and DVD/CD drive, it seems that after inserting Disc 1 and InstallShield wizard getting to the "InstallShield is configuring your new software installation", it loads for a long time and then acts as if it's looking for something. This is indicated by the CD/DVD drive light turning off (data no longer being accessed) and the HD light speeding up (showing that it is not blinking in synch with data transfer with the DVD/CD drive)
It's amazing how much you can troubleshoot something just by being perceptive.
So assuming that it was looking for the next installation disc, I then loaded Disc 1 in the DVD drive and Disc 2 in my CD/RW drive. When the DVD drive light went off, the HD light flickered a little faster, then POOF the CD/RW light came on and the HD light again flickered in the characteric way indicating synch data transfer between the CD/RW drive
At which point, I removed Disc 1 and then put in Disc 3
So the problem seems to be with InstallShield, it doesn't want to prompt the user to "Insert the next disc"
I have ISScript9 as InstallShield website says that I need to run Far Cry's setup.exe (which is version 9). Yet InstallShield still doesn't work
I tried copying all of the files from Disc 1 to my HD and running setup, but again I got an error when it finished installing those files. It didn't prompt me to insert the next CD, or prompt a source for Disc 2's data
Another way to fix this I suspect is to copy ***ALL*** of the discs (or entire DVD) into a folder. I made the mistake of just installing Disc 1 and expecting it to then prompt me for Disc 2 data. However I'm not sure how the InstallShield wizard looks for the data, whether it looks for a "Disc 2" folder or not, so how you organize all the discs in a single folder will determine if this works
Lastly, another thing that indicates a problem with InstallShield wizard is that the progress bar does not update or display the progress of the installation, even though I was able to load Disc 1, Disc 2, etc. and for it to read and copy the data from each
Now to finally play the game and see if I get to have as much fun debugging the graphics! Took 10 hours to fix this, hopefully I can enjoy a little of the game before it decides to get buggy again..