Drive\Device\harddisk\Dr1 error when booting up game

[Dsanzo]

Hi,

A week ago or so my digital copy of Civ5 started telling me I had to put in a disc to play the game by giving me this message: "Please Insert a Disk into Drive\Device\harddisk\Dr1" error".

Lately I've been using an external HDD (1TB Maxtor basics desktop storager) a lot but I've played the game before and after using it with my computer (to store & watch shows etc).

So far troubleshooting through google has gotten me nowhere so far;
- I used drivecleanup.exe in my system32 folder
- after using that exe I tried disconnecting my external HDD and rebooting my PC
- I tried renaming my external HDD from I to A
None of these things had any effect in regards to my problem.

I realize that this might be something hardware related, and not related to Civ5 in particular, but it ONLY happens to Civ5 and no other games in my collection of Steam games.
My steam support 'ticket' has been up for a day or 3 now and still no answer whatsoever has been given to me.

My apoligies if this problem has been posted on the site before but a quick search didn't turn up any similar problems and I've been struggling with this problem for a while now and would greatly appreciate any help you can give me.

 

[Petek]

Welcome to CivFanatics!

It seems as if the game is looking for something on your external HDD. I suggest verifying your cache files (Steam --> Library --> Right-click Sid Meier's Civilization 5 --> Properties --> Local Files --> Verify Integrity of Game Cache) and see if that helps. Please post again if that doesn't work.

 

[Dsanzo]

thanks for the quick reply,

I actually stumbled upon that validating thing, did it and it had no effect. I just ran it again and it didn't have any effect either, sadly.

Would you know of any other things I could try to do?

 

[Petek]

This is a long shot, but open your config.ini (location is C:\Users\(user name)\Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5) file in Notepad. Find the following entry:

; Save Path - relative to working (Civ5) folder
FileName =

Is anything present for the FileName?

Did you ever use your external HDD for anything related to Civ?

You might want to look in your Event Log for instances of this error message. There might be something that hints what is causing it.

I found a workaround on the net. You can make a registry change that will suppress the error message. The only problem with this workaround is that it suppresses all similar error messages, not just the one you're getting. If this interests you, see this Microsoft article.

 

[Dsanzo]

In my config.ini it says the same as your message:

; Save Path - relative to working (Civ5) folder
FileName =

nothing more nothing less

I've never used my HDD for any of my games, all the files associated with my games are on my computer's internal HDD, which is actually why I don't understand where this problem is coming from.

Also haven't heard from steam support yet, great service, they're learning from EA...

Suppressing the error message seems like a bit of work so I'll get on that later, thanks for the advice.

If you, or any other person that's more gifted with these sort of things than me, would know why this error suddenly started appearing be sure to let me know. I am craving to play this game as of late

 

[Dsanzo]

by the way, where do I get access to my event log?

 

[Petek]

by the way, where do I get access to my event log?

Select Start --> Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Event Viewer. The error messages probably will be in the section titled Windows Logs.

 

[Dsanzo]

steam actually managed to reply and told me to do the following:

"As a test can you please try the following steps? Basically I would like to see if reinstalling the game resolves the issue.

Exit Steam entirely.

Browse to your Steam installation (Usually C:\Program Files\Steam\)

Rename the "steamapps" folder to "old_steamapps"

Re-launch Steam and re-install the game.

Once the installation is complete, test the issue.

If this resolves the issue, you may copy the new files into the "old_steamapps" folder and rename it to "steamapps" to restore your other games without re-downloading."

needless to say I was quite sceptical about this approach since I had already reinstalled the game without renaming my steamapps folder, but for some reason this worked and I managed to boot up Civ with no problems. So apparently this works as a fix!

Haven't played the game properly yet since I have other things that i have to do today but I'm glad I found a solution to this problem for now,

Thanks for your help, I've screencapped this thread for future purposes, should I ever run into a similar problem again.

 

[Petek]

Thanks for taking the time to post the solution to your problem. Glad to hear that the game now works.