CD drive not recognized as cd drive by software

I am running windows xp on an older computer and put the game, empire earth on it. When any type of user other than administratior attempts to play the game, it says insert the disk in the drive, even when the disk is in. When you log on as a regular user and run the program as a person with administrative permissions, it works. Why won't it work for a regular user and how can I fix this?

 

It does the same to me. I don't have Empire Earth, but it does it to several games. Downright annoying, but so far, my kids haven't screwed anything up.
I will have to search deeper for the solution, if there is one.

 

this bites... i bet adryn knows how to fix it... where is he?

 

I'm sorry to let you down, I don't know how to permanently resolve this.


99% of PC games out there require administrative rights.


Especially an older game, which was originally designed to have direct hardware access (I think I read this game was originally for 98).


Seems to me IF you could locate the registry key(s) responsible for the CD check, and change the permissions to give Everyone group full control, then you could get past this.

But then, you might run into another problem with a different part of the game.


I would try a Run As.... (right click the shortcut) , and run it as an Administrative user.


Or, this seems like one of those times a NO CD crack might come in handy, but for self preservation on this board I can't post a link, you will have to seek it out yourself.

 

Well I think I found a temporary fix while I can't find any other way to do it. If you give the guest account admin privelages, then use Tweak UI to hide it off the welcome screen, you can run as and use the guest account without it getting mad at you for not supplying a password. works great when you have little brothers that you would rather not want to give them the password to your user account. I think I will look into a CD emulator to try to fix this.