DVD reads movies but not games!

My DVD drive will play movies but will not open DVD based games, namely Half Life 2 and Battlefield 2. Battlefield 2 is a new game and has not yet worked on my computer but Half Life 2 previously worked before we formatted the computer.

I put the disk in, it whirrs but nothing happens. When I open up 'my computer' to try to explore the disk it opens up incredibly slowly and soon freezes.

The guys at evesham havnt a clue what is up, they think possibly some form of spyware but the best they can come up with is reformatting the whole hard drive. Anyone help?

 

I had the same sort of problem and the reason behind it was that my DVD drive was a little too old, im not sure why this affected it but it worked fine on my other more modern one. Sorry if this doesn't help.

 

Nah won't be that, it previously worked fine with HL2. Could it possibly be a virus or spyware of some sort?

 

Hmmm, I suppose its possible, but highly unlikely. If someone did manage to disable you DVD drive I would of thought that nothing would of worked rather than just game. Only other things that I can possibly think of is that the drive might just need a lens clean, you can buy CD cleaners from most computer shops now, Or that you need to re-install the DVD rom driver. But apart from that I'm stumped

 

It could be the copy protection games use.

Also, have you tried to completely uninstall them, then reinstall?

 

Yeah neither of them are installed. I don't get a run screen or anything.

Has anyone heard of malware that when you insert certain popular games runs through the disk searching for a CD Key, thus causing the freeze?

 

No, but I've heard of copy protection that does that.

Also, some games won't run if you have certain burning programs and virtual drives installed.

 

Why would copy protection do that on genuine copies?

 

To prevent the game from being copied and, especially in the case of virtual drive software, to prevent copied games from running.

 

I reformatted and reintalled drivers etc, and when I try to run a DVD game I get the error message 'D:\ is not a vaild Win32 application.'

 

This error normally happens when the media is dirty or scratched.

Try cleaning it, or if that fails, replace the disc.

You could extract the files and burn them to DVD, but you would have to defeat the copy protection, and that's something I won't go into, so that's not an option.

I suggest you also clean out the temp files using Disk Cleanup in Accessories, System Tools.

 

hello i have the same problem but i can play games but not movies. bane of my life.. i think that these two problems could be connected. i am not sure. if i fix it ill tell you. just thought i would post, just incase one of us prevail. cya UKARMYCADET.

 

Well I just reformatted so nothing will need cleaning out. I checked out the disks on another computer and they ran fine. I think its a more funamental issue related to some kind of hardware malfunction.