Tech Support please?

[pfrsue]

You know, I only seem to post on here when I'm befuddled about something. This is not a good trend. *sigh*

Anyway, here's the problem.

I have Age of Empires II. It works fine.
I have Age of Empires II The Conquerors Expansion Pack. It used to work fine. Now, even though the intro screen pops up when I put the game in, when I push "Play", it hems and haws through "Loading" and then tells me it can't locate the CD-ROM and asks me ever so politely to insert it and restart the application. (I'm starting to take this very personally.)

At first I thought it was a physical problem with the game since it had a few small scratches on it, so I went out and bought another one. Same problem. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem. I downloaded whatever updates I could find. Same problem. I used a drive cleaner on the drive. Same problem. I can play AoE, I can play Rise of Nations. My son can play StarCraft. I can't play The Conquerors. It's actually becoming a matter of pride here.

Has anyone else come across anything like this? Or do I need to look up Exorcists in the phone book?

Help!

Sue

[PoolMan]

Wow, that IS a weird one. Have you been to their support Forum? There may be a patch or a workaround. Are you patched to the current revision?

[Head Mutant]

Sounds like a possible copy protection bug... some games really get hung up requiring the original CD to be in the drive and whatnot.

[Head Mutant]

There's a whole bunch of troubleshooting links here:

support.microsoft.com/ph/560/en-us/?sid=1509&aid=3&GSA_AC_More3

And this one looks like it might be related:

support.microsoft.com/kb/303027/en-us?spid=560&sid=1509

Or:

support.microsoft.com/kb/250299/en-us?spid=560&sid=1509

[Lordmoon]

Are you inserting the expansion CD or the original game CD? Sometimes the xpack will be loaded onto your PC and you only need to use the orginal first game's CD to play the whole thing.

[pfrsue]

Thanks guys. I'd already been to the microsoft support site and downloaded any fix I could think of. Also, I'm sure that the game needs the expansion CD in the drive to play. I even did (yet another) uninstall/reinstall this afternoon. Nothing works. *heavy sigh*

[Spiderdancer]

Unrelated tech support question:

Has anyone here successfully gotten an Nforce4 motherboard to work with a maxtor SATA drive? I've got the blue screen of death on attempted boot to install Windows XP with the 0x07 message. I thought it might be the 6800 GT graphics cards, but I took one out and tried it in non-SLI mode and still got BSOD.

I KNEW I should've gone AMD for Sib1's computer, but it's waaaay too late now...

[Head Mutant]

Oh stop your sweet talk. You know how it gets the geeks in a ruffle.

[Spiderdancer]

Hey, you're talking to the geek that refers to her computer as "my baby." ;D

[PoolMan]

I've got a Maxtor SATA drive (first SATA drive ever, woot!), but AMD chipset. Sorry! My computer works fine!

[Spiderdancer]

Sib1 and I both have AMD CPUs(Athlon 64 4000+, to be specific). It's the motherboard that's an Nforce4. This means the northbridge/southbridge are made by Nvidia. I have a Maxtor hard drive in my own machine, but my mobo/graphics are ATI and they work with it fine.

If I get Sib1's computer to work I am never touching Nvidia again. Ever.