Dvd Drive Problems

I have a HEl 80 with a dvd combo drive. I am trying to install Civ IV and the drive doesn't recognize it. When it did, all the drive was doing was spinning it like a turbine from a plane. That was like 1/10 tries of inserting and ejecting the disc. Is there a firmware upgrade? I sometimes have the same problem on Wacraft where I have to keep pushing retry before it finds the cd. Please somone help me. Thanks!

 

I guess it reads other discs fine. But it can't read disc one of CIV IV. ARGH this problem is annyoying. I just got the game and has no scratches what so ever on the disc. My desktop reads it just fine.

 

I have Civ 4 and have been able to install it without any problems. If the drive reads every other disk fine then I would think it was a problem with the Civ 4 , disk, but if other disks dont work then I think you probably have a defective drive. I think calling tech support would be your best option.

 

I installed Civ IV also without any problems, and mine is somewhat scratched. I read somewhere that some of the 2 disc sets for Civ IV were mislabeled, if you have two discs, try using the other disc as an install disc. Don't know if that would help at all.

 

argh this is sooo annoying, i can get other games and dvds to work but this stupid game doesn't want to work. does anyone else know what to do. i called tech support but i don't really want to send it in.

 

make an image of the cd ( http://www.magiciso.com/) on the desktop where the cd works.
Install deamon tools on your laptop and mount the image of the cd.

This should work, but it doesn't fix your dvd combo drive. It only allows you to play the game.

 

Yeh this is an odd problem every single cd or dvd that i put in works, but for this one.

 

From what I'm reading here, I would think it's more of a CD issue than a DVD drive one.

Did tech support suggest you send it in?

 

Yeh tech support wanted me to send it in. But since it works for other cds and dvds I think Im going to just keep it. Right now Im going to try to burn a copy as an image and have a emulator run it. If anyone has any suggestions on running the game please let me know. Thanks you!

 

Or you could share the cd/dvd rom drive of your desktop and install over your network?

 

how would you do that?

 

if you have a network, just share the whole drive of the desktop (right click and share) and then access it from the laptop. Maybe someone else is better in explaining all this

 

I had the same problem with this drive installing FFXI. Only when I examined the disks that gave me trouble very closely did I notice the scuff marks. The disks all worked fine in my desktop, and the ones that didn't work in my laptop were the only ones with that kind of scuff on them, so my guess is that the laser or optics or whatever in this drive are a little pickier than most.

You could try copying the disks with your desktop, or making an image and sharing it across the network, as somebody else suggested.

 

alright, i will try that magic iso thing and see if that works. i am still open to suggestions!

 

All of you people who say you installed these games without problem, you all have the dual layer dvd combo drive?

The issue is that the "cool" way to protect cd copying these days is to introduce errors into the disc (making them non standards compliant, nice huh?). The installer looks for these errors on the disc to insure that you are installing from the original. The problem is that rewritable drives (dvd and cd) often have problems with these disks. Its not just the first disc either, most of the time its every single disc in the install set. A perfect example is EverQeust Titanium (first 10 expansions in one set). Every disc exibits the exact same behaviour.

Some drives handle this more gracefully and just forge ahead and skip over the errors (usually making the entire disc read process take about 20x longer than normal). The dual layer drive in the HEL80 though pretty much tanks on all of the games I have in my possession which I know for sure use this copy protection technique. I really don't know what that says about the quality of the drive but I tend to blame the software companies for pulling this crap in the first place.

 

I'm thinking about getting a HEL80 and I would want a DVD burner but I'm not so sure after reading this. Do you know if there's a way to find out which games use this crappy software protection?

 

Alright guys I fixed it. Problem- Crappy cd. Went to Fred Meyers and got me another copy. For some reason it the single disc didn't want to be read. But I installed the game fine and also installed the expansion. Evitaerc don't worry about the dvd drive acting up like this. I would still got for this laptop and the dvd burner! If you read this thread other people got the game working also.

 

Alright thanks for the reassurance! I've been looking at laptops for weeks and I think I've finally decided on this one and then reading this thread just made me unsure again, lol.

 

that doesn't change the fact that there are known titles were you will always have problems like these with RW drives. I don't think the HEL80 even comes with a read only drive so the point is moot anyway.

 

Hate to nitpick, but it's one of those things that just irks me. Like calling someone a "looser" when you really mean that they're a "loser", or proclaiming yourself a "genious", or saying "I could care less", when you actually "couldn't care less", the phrase is actually "moot point", not "mute". It's nothing personal, Hohlraum, I'm just a bit of a linguistic puritan. Those things make me have to re-read stuff a couple times to get what the author was trying to say, rather than just understanding his verbage
Back on topic, yes, copy protection sucks. I've had problems with Prince of Persia, and Civ IV, but primarily with Far Cry. That has the worst (ie, biggest pain in the rear) copy-protection scheme I've seen.

 

Fixed. You know what irks me? People who nitpick.