PCTech Forums

Um..I just formatted my harddrive, and I installed Medal of Honor, and a few other games, and once I restart my computer, the games won't work anymore, and another program i have for half-life (called steam) gives me an error report now, because it can't start when windows starts. I think the problem lies in my cd rom drive as it is a sony which means it sucks. I can install everything just fine, but once I restart my computer some of my games and programs just won't start, and steam gets an error report. As I said before I formatted my harddrive and this still happens I have a kt400 8x motherboard with the VIA drivers or whatever VIA chipset, 512 kingston ddr ram, Athlon Xp 2400+ 2.0 ghz, and a Geforce4 ti4800. Just wanted to know if anyone could help me out thanks.

I have run basically everything on the xp cd also, and I have all the newest drivers installed for everything too, so it's none of that.

What happens when you try and run games?

It just won't start, like autorun comes up and I click play (for medal of honor for example) and it just loads the little cd icon comes up next to my mouse cursor, then it just does nothing and won't load, same thing happened to diablo 2, but starcraft works, and battlefield 1942 works, it's only some games and the steam application. I don't get it.

Had you been running XP previously and reformatted or is this a new install and these games have never run in XP on this PC? You might try running the games in a lower Compatibility Mode to see if that helps.

They used to run fine I think just for some reason my cd rom drive is getting crappy, I'll try lower compatability mode though thanks.

Are you games copies or the original disk?

All are the originals, I have windows xp, they worked before, my cd rom drive is a little old, but I can't run them from my cd burner drive either, and I know the cd-rw reads because I get the autorun to come up, and besides this doesn't have anything to do with why my steam application doesn't run, so I don't think it's a cd rom drive problem.

Could this Steam program be causing your troubles?
I did a little research on this Steam program you have.
According to there website they have been having troubles starting on 9/17/03 and on 9/18/03 their whole system was down. Also in their news section they stated something about new installers coming out on 9/16/03. There are a number of Steam users having problem like yours in the forums page of Steam’s website and most of them say that reinstalling Steam resolves their problems. In fact one post from a mod said to just keep reinstalling until it works right. As for Steam not starting with Windows one post said to make sure that Steam does not load with Windows. With all that I read from their site this Steam program could very easily be the root of your problems.

Ok cool I'll try it out, thanks for that, next time though just give me the link to the website and tell me to look around, just so you dont go through all the work heheh. But thanks again.

Yeah - steam's been a bit of a PR nightmare for valve. I think their servers just couldn't cope with the millions of people trying to get online & play. Give it a week or so to iron out the bugs & hopefully it'll be useable again