Did I break my Warlords?

[BakingTheArt]

I just finally got around to downloading patch 2.13, and now the game won't recognize the disc. I have no idea what's going on. I insert the Warlords disc, and I click the icon, and then a "Please insert disc" message comes up.

Any ideas? I want to play some civ.

 

[AlanH]

I had this problem with my Civ4 vanilla disk. At first it would still launch after several tries, but eventually it got worse and I had to retry lots of times before it would work. As each attempt can take 30 seconds to time out, this got infuriating. I tried cleaning the DVD with a soft cloth, and using a cleaning disk for the DVD drive heads, but that didn't fix it. I could see a few scratches on the disk surface, so I decided these may be the problem.

After doing some research I tried polishing the disk surface. My first attempt was with toothpaste, based on a YouTube demo, but it was not effective. I then tried Brasso ... and it seems to be much improved.

 

[BakingTheArt]

I never had anything like this problem without the patch. Maybe I downloaded it faulty? Anyway, is there any way to revert it back to 2.00, and see if that works?

 

[AlanH]

Does vanilla Civ4 still work OK?

The patch is unlikely to have cause this. I actually suspect there was a change as a result of an OS update at some point. My gut feel is that the copy protection software does some time-critical checks on data on the DVD, it was tuned to work with the DVD drivers that existed at the time the software was release, and the DVD drivers have since changed making the timings marginal.

If you want to try reverting then you will need to reinstall from the DVDs. If your Mac can see each DVD then you should delete the entire Civ4 application folder, replace it with a new copy from the Civ4 DVD, then run the Warlords installer. if your Mac can't even read the DVDs then you have a problem with your DVD drive.

 

[BakingTheArt]

My vanilla works fine.

I'll just try reinstalling that.