Cannot Locate Conquests CD (plus workaround)

[corporalclegg9]

Hi, all! I've never posted here before, but I do browse the forums occasionally, and I'm hoping to perhaps save someone some time.

When I first loaded Conquests, no matter what I did it could not locate the Conquests CD. I have a DVD-ROM Drive and a CDRW Drive, and neither one could locate the CD on startup. Now, the game INSTALLED fine, and it would Autorun when I put the CD in, but once I double-clicked the icon to run the game, it would prompt me to insert the Conquests CD and restart the game.

In order to get around this, I had to disable all of my CD drives EXCEPT for the Master drive on my Secondary IDE. This happened to be my CDRW. I then rebooted and checked My Computer, where it now only recognized my Floppy ( A: ), my two hard drive partitions ( C: and D: ) and my CDRW ( E: ). Things work fine now.

Prior to disabling my other drives, I had a DVD-ROM ( F: ) and a virtual SCSI drive ( G: ). As long as those were enabled, I could not start Conquests no matter which drive I used.

 

[AceDragon]

Thanks I was about to start crying.... the newest Civ 3 expansion in my hands, just installed and no work. Looks like I've got similar problem. Thanks a million for your post.

 

[general_kill]

I still dont understand what u just posted but i often have this problem. I found that if i just restart my computer, it usually fixes everything. but i have to wait 30 minutes at start up for those pop ups to go away.

 

[corporalclegg9]

Originally posted by general_kill
I still dont understand what u just posted but i often have this problem. I found that if i just restart my computer, it usually fixes everything. but i have to wait 30 minutes at start up for those pop ups to go away.

I've (VERY rarely) had problems similar to this in the past, and in all other cases I was able to get around them by rebooting or trying a different drive, or something similar.

This time, though, NOTHING worked. I rebooted a million times, I wiped my drive clean of any version of Civ and reinstalled all from scratch, I tried different drives, I tried running from the shortcut, running from the executable, probably other things, too. This is the first time that I had to disable drives to get something to work. In addition, I re-enabled my old drives just for kicks, and the problem reappeared.

 

[dannyevilcat]

This kind of behavior also happens to me with PTW (I don't have Conquests), and also Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.
Both use SecureROM, which is what they use for copy-protection, and it sucks. Sucks. Sucks.

 

[OmniMower]

aw... SecureROM??? holy hell! ... can someone confirm if they use SecureROM for C3C?

 

[Masquerouge]

Originally posted by dannyevilcat
This kind of behavior also happens to me with Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide.

I confirm that. The problem people have with C3C happens to me with NWNSoU, and only NWNSoU (my newest game BTW) so I guess SecureROM has a strong case for incrimination here...

 

[Falcon02]

Better then my Laptop drive... CD-Drive just about refuses to recognize half my CD's (including my restore disk). Others I have to Eject and reload about 20 times (no exageration) before it'll see the disk.

 

[Gobi Bear]

SecureROM was NOT used for Conquests. Macrovision's SafeDisc was used again (that was what was used for the original Civ3, at least in the US).

Same copy protection scheme was also used world-wide this time (a big plus in case of future updates).