DVD drive won't read 2 different Sims 3 disks, but will play other disks.

[wildredchild]

Hi everyone.  I uninstalled all my sims 3 games, vanilla, WA, HELS and Ambitions in order to get a complete fresh install since I was having some problems with a few glitches here and there and was not able to add my store bought items into my game.  I used the articles in this section to manually uninstall the games in order, ran disk cleanup, then disk defragmenter.  I then restarted my computer and went about reinstalling all my games.  All seemed good until I tried to run Ambitions at which point I got an error screen.  I once again ran through the manual uninstall, disk cleanup, disk defrag and restart computer.  This time when I installed just the base game I decided to see if it would run before going through all the installation again.  I ran into the QtCore4.dll problem.  I could not play my game.  Searched the internet and found that it was EADM messing up, so I uninstalled and reinstalled EADM.  I had also uninstalled Adobe reader, Adobe Air and Adobe (something else) don't remember what it was right this minute.  I reinstalled all the Adobe stuff, cleaned my disk, defraged my drives and then rebooted the system yet again.  All of this has taken place over the past 5 days and evenings.  To say I am frustrated is just not the description I would choose.  I am way beyond frustration and ready to mail all my games back to EA and be done with the entire thing.

I decided to try one more time today.  Everything is freshly started so I know my computer is ready to go and I pop the disk into my drive and then wait for the auto-installer to pop up and nothing happens.  Not good.  I open My Computer and right click on the drive with the disk (it recognized it) and select install.  Wait.  Nothing.  Ready to explode.  Go out to the living room and ask my daughter for the other copy of Sims 3 basic so that I can try that disk.  Same thing.  I pop open the drive and put in a music cd and it plays just fine.  Take that out and try again with sims 3.  No glory. 

Basic information about this problem is that now I can't even install the game.  Does anyone have any suggestions that I have not tried above?  I don't have anything from EA on my computer at this point, so nothing from them is interfering that I can see.  If I could wipe my drive and re-install windows from scratch I would, but we all know that they do not give us the operating systems with our machines anymore and I can't spend any money trying to fix this stuff.

Please help if you can.

[The Illuminator]

Try inserting the game again. It may say something like 0mb of ...mb... Try to open the disk (manually, so no autoplay) and copy/paste all files in your C:. Then try to hit the setup button

[wildredchild]

Once all the files are copied to the C drive, will I hit setup in the C drive or from my E drive (dvd drive)?

[Seriphina]

Music CDs function a little differently than a DVD-rom disc in your computer.  Have you tried putting another game disc in?  If it does not run the game disc (Non Sims of course) then it could be that you simply need a new disc drive.  They're not that expensive and amazingly easy to install.

[The Illuminator]

Once all the files are copied to the C drive, will I hit setup in the C drive or from my E drive (dvd drive)?

From your C drive. Tell me if it works. I have done this before. It may take some time until you see anything happen.

[wildredchild]

@The Illuminator - You are a lifesaver and I thank you from the bottom of my heart!  Doing what you said has me able to play the Sims again.

@Seriphina, as I said in my original post, I have NO money to spend right now as my bills and groceries for my children will always come before purchasing things I may or may not need to run this game.  I don't have any other "game" disks to put in to test out what you stated unfortunately.  Thank you for trying to help me.

[The Illuminator]

No problem, wildredchild! I'm happy it's fixed now. If this ever happens again, just try this trick and it'll work 90 % of the cases.

EDIT: I posted this method again in the Technical Help board for use in the future.

[Seriphina]

Sorry I missed that part.  I'll go back to my corner.

[Archer0]

If problems persist in the future, just contact EA support.  I've read that many times they will send you a digital version of the game if your CDs get messed up.

[wildredchild]

Thank you for the reply Archer0.  It is not the disks that are messed up, but that the EADM is messed up.  I was finally able to fix the entire situation by disconnecting from the internet during the installation process for all my disks (base + WA + HELS + Ambitions)  I then choose not to update my game and everything ran fine.

Update: Just decided to chance doing the recent update that got released with the newest stuff pack and now I am back to having problems again.  Way to go EADM.  I will once again, uninstall everything, then reinstall without internet connection and will not be updating to the latest update/patch.

[A1eclitask]

If your ROM cannot read DVD I think it might be the codec error. Make sure the disk you insert is MPEG2. You can download HandBrake http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/is-handbrake-safe.html and choose the MPEG2 as the output format. Then burn it to a blank DVD and insert it to the ROM again. Another simpler way is to directly convert the DVD that cannot be played into MP4 format to let it play on Windows Media Player or VLC.