Using an external CD/DVD drive

[s.bernbaum]

I suspect that some short sighted individual at Aspyr hard coded CIV to look for the DVD-ROM in the internal CD/DVD drive. However, if I'm wrong, I'm wondering if anyone knows how to reset the game to look in an external CD/DVD drive? I bought an external drive with drawer loading specifically to keep my CIV disk in, so that I would not scratch it putting it into the slot loading drive built into the Mac. All of my other CDs and DVDs, including the Snow Leopard Installer and Warcraft (which similarly to CIV requires the disk to be in the drive to start the game), work fine with the external drive. However, CIV (and BTS) tells me to insert the disk in order to start the game, even though the disk is already in the external drive and can be seen on the desktop.

 

[AlanH]

I had a similar problem with my internal drive for a while. If I was persistent I could repeatedly mount/eject/clean*/try-again/.... and eventually it would accept it. The softwasre would take tens of seconds to decide to reject my attempt to launch it. During my attempts to diagnose the problem, I seem to recall I took samples of the Civ4 application activity while it was deciding to fail, and found that it seemed to be stuck in a timing loop, trying to check something on the DVD.

This was true with vanilla, Warlords and BtS, and was a royal PITA given that I have to build nine start files for Mac players in the various GOTMs every month!

After a few months of this pain, during which there may have been an OS X and/or Civ4 upgrade or two, the problem disappeared and I can now reliably start up any of my three Civ4 disks on my first attempt.

My hypothesis is that the DVD drive software has to be closely matched to the timing requirements of Aspyr's copy protection software, and something had got out of step between Apple's DVD driver and Aspyr's code. After some upgrade, the problem was resolved.

I am guessing that you may be suffering from a similar problem. What interface are you using to talk to the external drive? If it's a timing problem then perhaps a firewire drive might be better (or worse!) than a USB one?



•Disk cleaning was obviously a red herring, and all it needed was repeated attempts.

 

[s.bernbaum]

The external drive has both USB and firewire 400 ports. My computer is the last Duo cpu Mac Mini, running OSX 10.6.8. It, of course, has a firewire 800 port. Recently, I purchased an adapter for the firewire 800 to step it down to 400. It had not occurred to me that the interface could be the problem. I will hook up the firewire connection and see if that works. Thanks for the suggestion.


EDIT - 1 hour later: Thanks for the suggestion again!!! As I was about to switch the interface, it occurred to me that I had not tried the external drive since I bought my Mac Mini Duo with Snow Leopard a few weeks ago. Prior to that, I was running a PPC Mac Mini with Tiger 10.4.11. So, I just popped the disk in the drive and it worked with the USB interface. Your comments about updates and changes in drivers made me wonder if the new ones would make a difference. They sure did! It's been driving me crazy for a couple of years! (My apologies to Aspyr for all the nasty thoughts about whoever I thought had hard coded it that way.)