Did DRM break my optical drives?

**jazzadellic** · October 12, 2012, 04:28 PM

Installed MTW2 played it for a couple days, generally no problems, it crashed on me last night, it was late so I went to sleep. This morning try to boot it up, it doesn't see the disc in the drive, even though the disc is definitely in the drive. So I pop the drive open and shut it, nothing, no auto play, and it won't see the CD in the drive when I look at "my computer", so I pop it into my other optical drive, nothing, wont see the disc. I open and shut each drive about 4x, and I also pop in both discs (MTW2 and Kingdoms), nothing. Ok so now I'm tripping out why won't it see the discs. I reboot and same thing. Ok so now I pop in some of my other discs like another game disc, nothing, music CD, nothing. Both of my drives will no longer see any discs that I put into them. Now if one was doing this, I would assume it was a parts failure. But the fact that both my optical drives stop working at the same time seems to much a coincidence. I'm assuming at this point it is the DRM that MTW2 installed. Has anyone else heard of this problem happening? And is there any other way to fix it other than a full windows re-install? I just did 2 windows re-installs in the last month, and I really don't want to do a 3rd one.

**irishron** · October 12, 2012, 04:36 PM

Post your dxdiag.

**jazzadellic** · October 12, 2012, 05:04 PM

Ok, I've never posted dxdiag before, and have no idea how to analyze it myself, but here it is, it's kind of long so I'll put it with a spoiler button I guess. Just a couple other notes, I've installed several games and watched DVDs within the last few weeks so I know my dvd burner drive was working fine recently, and when I installed windows I had to use my other drive, so I know that one was working fine recently. I did a quick google and am seeing other posts / questions mentioning optical drives not working because of DRM, so I'm pretty confident that is the problem. I saw one post that said something like "securom will disable all of your drives except 1 because it thinks you don't need more than 1 drive to run the game", and I noticed that even though I have only 2 optical drives, my computer sees my printer as a "removable drive" so I tried disconnecting that to see if it would make a difference, but it didn't. And neither drive is working at all at this point. Most likely it is a glitch in the securom software, as I'm sure they didn't intend to deprive me of use of my optical drives ever again. But how do I fix it?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

**irishron** · October 12, 2012, 05:39 PM

I approved this post and deleted the other one. Less clutter.
Outside of your computer being quite old by today's standards, it looks good. It does ercognize both optical drives. They could be wearing out. I had to replace one of mine last month but it was at least seven years old. You may have to do the same.
When you reinstalled XP, did you also go to www.nvidia.com and try to update the motherboard drivers?

**jazzadellic** · October 12, 2012, 06:27 PM

Irishron, I appreciate your effort to help, but it seems none of those questions you have posed are really dealing directly with the issue. The odds are too great that both of my optical drives have worn out at exactly the same moment in time. Coupled with the fact that if one googles securom and optical drive, you come out with many posts relating securom to optical drive problems, this leads me to the obvious conclusion that it is related to securom. I did install mother board drivers from the disc that came with it, maybe not the most up to date motherboard drivers, but those drivers have run both optical drives with no problems for 6 years, (including a previous install and play through of a M2TW Kingdoms campaign) so that rules that out as being the problem. Ok, here's a question for you, don't take it the wrong way, but do you work for securom? Or maybe Creative Assembly? It seems like your trying to dodge the obvious culprit and get me thinking it's something else.

**irishron** · October 12, 2012, 06:36 PM

What games do you have installed?
What utities do you have installed not showing in the dxdiag?

**PoleCat** · October 12, 2012, 09:19 PM

@jazzadellic - If I may add to the discussion. You say one of your optical drives is a burner. Securom doesn't like anything to do with any tech (software or hardware) that is capable of burning ISOs.

With this in mind could you try disabling the burner drive from the Device Manager and try again with your read only drive. Now this is just a test but I hope it will at least show some result that we can build from. It probably won't solve your problem but it's a step into figuring out where the problem lies.

For the record my first hunch is that Securom has red flagged one drive (the burner) and then blackballed the rest out of sheer mindless zealotry. But I could be very wrong - it's been known to happen.

Good luck!

**irishron** · October 12, 2012, 09:31 PM

Both of my optical drives are burners.

**PoleCat** · October 12, 2012, 09:39 PM

Originally Posted by irishron

Both of my optical drives are burners.

Well that's food for thought. Then I'm probably wrong. But the question does remain - are his problems driver related, DRM related or hardware related? Tough question....

**irishron** · October 12, 2012, 10:05 PM

EA games with SecuRom will do this.
Any game with Starforce will do it.
Just about any program that tries to virtualize or emulate the real thing will trigger it.
Some movie making and sound redording software has been known to trigger it.

@OP, if you think the DRM is flagging something, contact www.securom.com and run their idiot test. Give them the results and if everything is legit, request a new .exe.

**War lord** · October 13, 2012, 04:30 PM

I had the same issue with MTW2's crappy DRM doing this, luckily the Computer in question was a hunk of scrap anyway.

But it only hit due to MTW2, so I'd say it's the DRM.

**jazzadellic** · October 15, 2012, 09:25 PM

Well I am also considering the possibility that both drives did in fact die at the same time....I mean I haven't used one drive for a few weeks, so maybe one died 3 weeks ago, and the other today, they are in fact both very old drives. One interesting thing though is I tried booting a CD from one and it was able to boot the windows install disc....and then I aborted that and rebooted, and popped a music CD into the same drive, and viola, it played the music cd. But then....it started skipping and freezing up (and cd is mint condition). But what's interesting is before I booted from the winxp cd, the drive was not working at all, after, it seemed to "wake" up for a little bit, and then stopped working again. Anyways, I tried a couple things. I found some threads on the web that deleting the upper and lower registry keys can sometimes fix that problem, and when I went into regedit, there were no upper and lower registry keys. Anyways, end of story is I remembered I had an old PC in the garage that had an optical drive on it. I pulled that out, wiped 4 years of dust off, popped it in to my machine and it worked like a charm....So I guess my conclusion is probably both drives were pretty old and worn out and that was the main issue. Maybe it never had anything to do with securom...I don't know...maybe it did? Anyways thanks for the suggestions.