Failure to Launch

[Urbanator 7]

Please excuse this post if this has been asked before (the forum search doesn't work).

Up until yesterday I have had no problems to speak of with SC4 but now I cannot play it at all.

My primary disc (Rush Hour) will no longer read in either drive and neither will the Deluxe version of the game.  Both discs spin and a soft clicking noise can be heard but no data is gathered.  Other random discs I have tried work normally so it doesn't appear to be the drives.  Its almost as if something is actually preventing SC4 from being played...

The PC is a dual-core AMD running XP (all specs in excess of prerequisites).  The game is fully patched via the official site.

Any suggestions regarding this problem will be appreciated.

[joshriddle 29]

How far does it get, to like the splash screen, or what. Or does it just not start at all? Just remains on the desktop?

[Urbanator 7]

Hi there.  Thanks for the assist.

The splash appears for a few seconds and then the disc error message appears.  There is no disc-checking before the error appears.

I can't help but think that there is hidden process that's banning the disc from playing or even being read - when the disc is in nothing appears but I can access the drive without being told there is no disc in.

[SC4BOY 20]

There is a startup verification program that runs (forget the name of it, but it has an odd name with a "$" sign in it or something) that checks the CD and system for a "valid copy of SC4") as best as I can tell it runs a CD read and some type of CRC or disk protection comparison test .. if you have a problem with that it can behave like that. It sounds to me like you have a damaged disk, but I'm just guessing. You say you can load other CD's so I am supposing it is not the drive.

[Urbanator 7]

Thanks SC4BOY that's pretty much what I was thinking...  I double-checked on my laptop and it reads the disc normally, so I imagine that probably means that unless I reinstall SC4 completely then I'm not going to be mayor any time soon.

[Urbanator 7]

Many thanks fellows Mayor!!  I decided to uninstall it and try Deluxe instead and so far it seems to be working.  Now all I have to do is reintegrate all my plugins... 

[SC4BOY 20]

It should be pretty simple since SC4+Rushhour = Deluxe assuming you have applied the EA patches, both should be exactly equal however you get there..

[Urbanator 7]

Yup - after a few days play I haven't noticed any problems or differences in the Deluxe setup.