Monday, August 22, 2011

Perplexing Update

I'm starting to wonder if dust had been the culprit for the disc not being read. Why it would only affect that one disc though I do not know.
I dusted out my disc drive tray with an anti-static brush and it's read the Stuff Pack disc without issue ever since.
So, unless there is a 'next time' the issue is solved.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Perplexed

I have nowhere better to put this so I may as well type it out here.
Last Saturday I purchased The Sims 3 Town Life Stuff Pack for The Sims 3 PC game.
When I got home I found my laptop wouldn't read the disk. Wanting to make sure it was the disk and not my laptop I tried a few other game and DVD disks. All of them ran fine.
I then decided to try the faulty disk on the old family laptop and to my surprise it read the disk without issue and autorun popped up to tell me that I needed to install The Sims 3 before I could install the Stuff Pack.
I was now very confused but decided it would probably be best if I returned the disk and exchanged it. This is what I did yesterday.
When I got home I tried the new disk with the same results as before, the disk couldn't be read. Why?! I tried it on the old laptop again and all ran fine like the previous time.
I decided that if my laptop couldn't read the disk then I could install the game by copying the contents of the disk onto my external hard-drive and install from there.
During the copying process I had the laptop give me the blue screen of death once and then tell me that the disk I was copying from was empty! I panicked thinking I had somehow erased the disk. After rebooting the machine again I found the disk was fine and continued to copy over the contents.
Before I attempted to install the copied files to my own laptop I thought to try the disk one more time. I have no idea why but I did anyway knowing full well it wouldn't work. I was wrong! The disk drive made a few odd clicking and crunching noises as it had done whenever it had failed before but this time autorun popped up and started the install process.
So to anyone who was bored enough to read through all of this entry, could it be possible that the errors on the family laptop did something to the disk to allow my own laptop to read it?