Isues with SafeDisc 4 (i'm not a pirate, i swear)

Have any of you had problems with anti-piracy programs on games not recognizing your optical drive?

So specifically, I have a brand new Asus S96J (from GenTechPC) with a “8 x DVD-RW Dual Layer Super Multi8 x DVD-RW Dual Layer Super Multi” not sure what brand it is. And when I try to play my (legally acquired) Civ4 game, I can install just fine, but when I try to play it mysteriously can’t see the disc in the drive.

I’ve done some research on the Civ4 forums, and it seems that there is a conflict with their anti-piracy crap. I had to install this horribly shady hack, SafeDisc 4 Hider, (I feel so dirty just having it on my computer) in order to get the game to work. I haven’t done anything funky to the computer yet; Civ4 was one of the first programs I even tried to install after avast (anti-virus) and OpenOffice.

Is there something about my drive that is causing the anti-piracy software to freak out? Am I missing some security software or drive identification thing (I have no idea what I’m talking about, just trying to see why Fireaxis thinks I’m a criminal even though I paid for the damn game.)

I guess I can keep using the hack, but I’d like to fix the problem if I can…

Oh, and I was able to install and play Railroad Tycoon 3 without issue, so the drive is functional. And I had previously installed and played Civ4 on my old computer, so it's not the disc itself.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

Some disc drives are incompatible with some safety precautions that manufacturers have in place (to prevent people from burning illegal copies). If you checked out forums elsewhere and that's what they said to use, then i suppose you could continue using it. I'm not too familiar with such matters though i had a similar problem with halo on my desktop and ended up just illegally burning a copy that works without a hitch ...

 

So I did a little more research and found out more than I really wanted to know about anti-anti-piracy.

What I was really looking for was a compiled list of programs/optical drives that are incompatible with SafeDisc 4, just to be sure that was my problem. I know the companies wouldnt have one, but I thought a forum or a usegroup out there would have done it. It turns out that it's probably not worth anyone's time to do that when there are cracks and other tools to work around the problem that are much faster and more effective.

Oh well. I guess I'm a hack.

Now I'm depressed.

 

I've heard there are pretty common coding problems on Civ 4 itself. In one case the computer reads the second disk as the 'play' disk, but since Disk 2 lacks the proper code it fails to launch. It's very possible that you just have a bad disk.