eat your exam

I previously wrote an article on how to get the WOW client for free and then use that to play on the free private servers available on the Internet. The one thing missing from that whole scenario was The Burning Crusade expansion pack which adds new races, classes, and locations, among other exciting things. The Blood Elves, especially, are very cool. I started playing with a Human Rogue on my own private server, but I’m probably going to start a Blood Elf Paladin soon now that I have the expansion pack.

Before continuing, this assumes that you have followed my previous guide to already get the World of Warcraft original game client.

Now, to get Burning Crusade click here, thanks to Toxic-Wow.net. Like before, this small file is only a downloader that will fetch the 1.15GB installer. Also like before, you should run the downloader as Administrator in Vista in order to ensure everything goes smoothly. Once it is done installing, you have Burning Crusade! If only it were that easy… there’s a few more things you have to do.

The update unfortunately resets your game to version 2.0.0, so you are going to have to reapply the patches. If you are like me and deleted them already, then you’ll have to download them again. In case you lost the link, click here to go to Blizzard’s official US Patch site. Get the 2.3.0 full patch, the 2.3.0 to 2.3.2 patch, and the 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 patch. Apply them all in order, running as Administrator for Vista.

Also, if you are using your own private server, there are other steps necessary to make the server BC-compatible. You are going to have to redo all your vmaps, DBC, and maps extracting. This process is detailed in Reaper-X’s Maps, VMaps, DBC Extraction Guide.. Just overwrite any duplicate files in your C:/wow/data folder with the ones newly generated by those steps. This time you won’t get an error for Expansion.MpQ file, since now you have the expansion.

There is one final step. You have to edit the mangosd.conf file. Search for “Expansion = 0″ and change it to “Expansion = 1″, then save the file. Now start up mangosd.exe and wait for it to parse all the new maps. When it is ready, do “setbc [username] 1″ where [username] is the username you use to login to WOW on your private server.