Sims 3 -- No Disk error?

[seawasp]

My son has a legitimate copy of the Sims 3. He starts it running and it tells him "No game disc found! Please insert Sims3 disc."

The disc is inserted in the drive. All other games he has work fine. This is the second copy of Sims3 this has happened on, so it shouldn't be a disc flaw. I've seen other reports of the same problem, but the only one that claimed to be a resolution (on a board called "Vizzed") doesn't seem to work.

EDIT to Clarify: There has been no attempt to copy the game. The DVD drive is not damaged; it works fine with other games. This game ONLY has problems.


Any suggestions? We were previously able to play this game on this computer, then one day it just started giving this error. We assumed that the problem had to do with the first disc going bad, but now that's obviously not the case.

Comments

[fabricdragon.livejournal.com]

did you try to make a safety back up? many game disks will self destruct if you try to copy them

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I had this problem with Sims 3 and another EA disk. It turned out to be the DVD drive, possibly coupled with some kind of animosity between my antivirus and EA's DRM - I ended up re-buying the second game on Steam and playing it that way (more DRM, but no hardware woes). Don't remember if I did that with Sims or just gave up on it, since this all coincided with the arrival of my son & a bit of a game hiatus as a result.

They make add-on USB dvd drives, that's what I use now so I don't have to deal with extracting the next one that goes bad - they're about 50 bucks IIRC.

Edit: thinking back I think my troubles started when I put a software on my PC to allow me to pull editable files from movie DVDs, but rebuilding the machine (it was due anyway) did not correct the problem, so there either was a hardware issue or the DRM was clever enough to break the drive.

[doctor dirlewanger (from livejournal.com)]

Have you tried to download a crack for the game? Should stop the game from checking if the disc is in the drive. If you have a legal copy of the game, cracking it is also perfectly legal.

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

.... that would be a neat trick with CDs or DVDs. I don't think Sims 3 is distributed on floppies.

[alex swavely (from livejournal.com)]

if your game has a cd key, you don't need to re-buy it to get it on steam - just enter your cd key into the appropriate spot in the steam app and you'll get it.

[alex swavely (from livejournal.com)]

If you're OK with steam, it's available there... You don't even need to pay again, just go to the main steam window and go to the menu 'Games' and choose 'Activate product on steam' - put in your cd key and it'll download the no-cd version.

[fabricdragon.livejournal.com]

no, i am not joking. many many games on DVD have a self destruct code sequence that causes the game to very slowly stall out. it is "activated" by trying to copy it.

for most games its only active on the COPY but for some it will destroy the original game as well.

its basically set up to copy in a damaged fashion.
seriously
known to be a factor and its how the game help lines know you have a pirate copy

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

Odd, I wonder how it damages the original media-- does it force the drive to use a write function on the disc to damage it?

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

That seems unlikely. I can imagine it dropping a hidden cookie on your computer that instructs the game to fail to load, and which persists through reinstalls of the game. If that's the case, in theory if you tried to install the game on another computer it should work.

On the other hand, I can't imagine any such scheme surviving for long in the wild before someone figured out where the hidden cookie was and how to remove it, and distributed that information far and wide over relevant forums. Since seawasp didn't mention finding anything like that, I doubt that's the case here.

[ricdavis.livejournal.com]

It's plausible that the area on the CD the copy protection code is trying to check is peculiar in some fashion, otherwise copying the CD would be trivial making it a futile copy protection measure. Perhaps that is causing an otherwise OK drive to display a fault.

Alternatively, the copy protection code in the game may be interacting badly with some other piece of software on the PC. Have you checked for any updates to the game, and tried uninstalling/reinstalling?