VeeshanVault

I'm confused. I bought Silent Hill 2 for PC and have a helluva time trying to get CD#1 to even be recognized on this computer, but it recognizes fine on the other computer.

When I load the CD into the drive, it rarely recognizes that there's a CD there and will not autostart nor explore the CD to view files. However, I have no problem on my other computer.

Anyone know why this might be?

Prolly a defective CD-rom drive.

but other CD's work, just not that one

Well, it could still be a defective cd-rom drive, that would be my guess at least. Might be because the cd has a few scratches or some such and it is just above what this drive will tolerate.

It could be a funky CD or CD-rom. Sometimes you can burn cd's and they'll read fine on some systems, but you'll find 1 where they dont. It could have a little mis-write or something that confuses that one cd-rom and not the other as well. It's a crappy deal, if nothing else I'd try getting a replacement copy and telling the place where you bought it the problem. It will probably confuse them enough just on that they won't ask anymore questions.

Is your CD-Rom a burner or some-such device??

Some copy protection schemes have been known to do some pretty funky things with some units.

TRy and find/check out the game's official message board for other ppl experiencing these problems.

I agree with Animalor. It sounds like a CD that has the safedisc form of copy protection. Safedisc (used a lot by Microsoft) is a protection that requires reading bad spots on the disc among other things. There are a lot of games that folks have had issues with safedisc and certain CD drives. I would check the game companies website like Animalor said, if it is a problem it probably has been posted on their support forums.

Disc duplicators are notoriously shoddy at times.. Fallout: Tactics had something like a 50% rate of people not being able to read one file in particular.. the solution of course was to make a 140Mb file downloadable from the publisher.. /shudder

my CD's aren't burned, they're valid copies i bought from the store. I was able to load the game on the other computer partially, but it keeps crashing on the 3rd CD, even though I was eventually able to load the game on this computer (the original problem one)... the CD drive is NOT a burner, however, the other computer has a DVD Writer on it, but i was using the regular 2nd CD drive anyway.

It's sporatic. Sometimes it will load (takes a helluva lotta time) and most of the time, the drive doesn't recognize the CD. It does not have any problems reading CD#2 or CD#3 but you can only play the game with CD#1 in the drive.

I think it's time to return the game and exchange it

Could just be a poor duplication, exchange it if you like the game, or return it if you don't

Coatlicue [KoE] wrote:my CD's aren't burned, they're valid copies i bought from the store. I was able to load the game on the other computer partially, but it keeps crashing on the 3rd CD, even though I was eventually able to load the game on this computer (the original problem one)... the CD drive is NOT a burner, however, the other computer has a DVD Writer on it, but i was using the regular 2nd CD drive anyway.

It's sporatic. Sometimes it will load (takes a helluva lotta time) and most of the time, the drive doesn't recognize the CD. It does not have any problems reading CD#2 or CD#3 but you can only play the game with CD#1 in the drive.

I think it's time to return the game and exchange it

We wern't saying you duplicated them. A lot of these safedisk problems occur with original disks from the distributors.

I hate games that force my to swap CDs out just to run them. I highly recommend using a no-CD crack. I found a couple at Megagames for Silent Hill 2. If you have the game installed and just need to put the CD in to start it up, this may solve your problemo.

Btw, scan any cracks for virii before installing!

Mippy

Odds are the issue is caused by Securerom copy protection. Had this issue with NWN. See if you have IDE driver updates for your MB or device driver updates for your cdrom drive.

I have the same problem when running some DVDs....