Games fail to load! Please help!!

[Kogre]

Hi.

I have installed XP Home and never had any problems in
the past when playing any of my games, namely Neverwinter
Nights, Max Payne 2 and Diablo II.

Up until recently though, my games have been failing to
load. I have updated all my games, updated all my
drivers, tried a combination of previous and recent
drivers for hardware and the games themselves and have
had no success.

Each of the games require a CD to be inserted into either
of my CD or DVD drives. I have had these CDs inserted
into either of these drives and still had no success.

Please read through carefully before suggesting
anything. I have posted in numerous forums asking for
help and all people have said is to try something I have
already said I have tried (ie trying new drivers/old
drivers etc).

When double clicking the icon to ANY application that
requires a CD after install, the CD does not spin as I
would expect it to in either of my CD/DVD drives. I have
tried the drives on my friends PC and established that
these are not faulty using the same drivers on the same
games.

This seemed to have happened rather abruptley. I did not
make any changes to my system, the problem just happened
to occur one day. It has forced me to format and re-
install
Windows XP on my hard-drive several times, but the
problem
is still there.

The problem I'm having does not seem to be something
reported as a bug in any of the games/applications that I
attempt to use. I have visited forums, emailed for
technical support but like it has been suggested,
everything points back to a Windows fault. As it happens
with EVERY program that requires a CD , it is obviously
not
an application problem, but a Windows one.

My CD/DVD drives work fine. I do not have any problems
with these and have established that they work by trying
them with the same applications on a different system.

I have a friend with an almost identical system and he
does not have any of the problems I've been suffering
from in the past few months. The only difference between
our systems is that he is running his system with a
slightly slower processor.

The games websites have only confirmed what I originally
suspected; it is a problem with the configuration of my
Windows XP Home.

As for resources, I have plenty. My system is soemwhat a
slightly above mid-range system running a 2.5Ghz Pentium
4 processor with 512BM RAM.

Windows is having trouble executing any post install disk
required applications. Please help. I'm getting sick of
trying silly things I have already tried and KNOW don't
work, ie re-installing windows after formatting my HDD.

 

[Chris H.]

Have you tried removing the CD-ROM in device manager and then rebooting,
having the system detect and install it again? Please keep your posts to
one thread. It is difficult to follow what people have previously suggested
when you bounce around.

 

[-xiray-]

Have you tried removing the CD-ROM in device manager and then rebooting,
having the system detect and install it again? Please keep your posts to
one thread. It is difficult to follow what people have previously suggested
when you bounce around.

FYI, I've seen WinXp lose track of the CD rom drive when inserting a
game disk. So far I've been able to correct the error by rebooting.

I'll have to watch this thread as I've heard elsewhere that XP
sometimes has difficulty recognizing CDs.

To the original poster, though I don't know if they have the answer to
your problem, in case the above suggestion about deleting the CD drive
in device manager does not work then you might want to see if you can
get any hints about the problem on
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp.htm

 

[Guest]

Please forgive me for posting the same thing again. I
can assure you that I did so in the intention that the
last thread not be forgotten after becoming overbeared by
more threads. Also, seeing that nobody suggested
anything constructive (as you have), I thought I'd make a
fresh start. If this thread decided to go the same way,
I would do the same. Call it spam if you like, but I
have a problem, as others say they have, and am
determined to get it fixed irregardless of being called
spam or not.

Now, as for your suggestion; no. I have not tried that.
I will do when I get home though.

Thank you for your input.

 

[Kogre]

Thanks Xiray! I'll look into that website. Appreciate
it.

 

[Kogre]

I have tried all suggested steps, the problem still
occurs. My "test" game is Diablo II, as instead of
having to reboot or remove the disc from the drive in
order for the problem top occur, it simply does not
recognise the disc as being the proper play disc (and it
is the proper disc, it has worked in the past). I've
tried playing with any registry settings I thought might
have been the cuase of this problem only to no avail.
Boo-hoo. (I did back it up and restore it afterwards.)
I might try disconnecting one of the drives and see if
the other drive picks the game disc up after I double
click the icon.

 

[Guest]

I have the same problem with XP pro, also have updated all drivers. I have a Pentium 4, 2.6 ghz 800mhz fsb CPU. 512 MB PC3200 RAM. Radeon 9600pro. TB Santa Cruz sound. Intel board, 865perl chipset. KHypermedia CDRW, LG Electronics DVD

Games, work beautifully right after install, but never run again
One thing I've noticed is that I can play the game fine as long as I never eject it from the disc drive, rebooting several times
I too think it's a windows problem and have exhausted tons of tech-support from many companies

Do you have any of the same components in your machine? I think quite a few people have this problem, we must organize to solve it, so Microsoft will come up with something to fix it. Let's try to find a common link. Also, it would be interesting to see if people have similar systems/components but have no problems. hope to talk soon, qmed.