Can't run Spore

I just bought spore and upon arriving home I attempted to run it on my computer, however when I insert the disc into the drive it spins for a while then starts to make strange noises and stops spinning, I attempted to play another disc and it worked perfectly, whats wrong with my computer!

 

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It's quite obvious that your computer simply rejects spore. It has no desire to have spores inside of it

 

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Could it be that you only have a CD drive? Most major games now come on DVDs which cannot be read by CD drives.

 

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could also be that you acidently picked up a mac version or a playstation version or something which is in a format the computer doesnt recognise

 

No, it is a WIN and Mac format disc and I do have a DVD drive on my laptop

 

if it keeps spinning most likely the disc is bad.

 

The disc seems fine and it seemed to run well on my desktop computer however my desktop doesn't have the graphics to run Spore

 

oh. i see now that it stops spinning.

 

Do other CD's work?

If yes: It's your CD
if no: It's your CD-drive

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If it's the drive, & it's making funny noises, you probably need to take it in for repair.

 

It's likely that your laptop model is sporting an older DVD drive incompatible with the DRM features of the SPORE disc if not just the production level of the DVD. I use to have problems back in the day where it was possible to burn a disc at a high speed like x32 or greater and lesser drives wouldn't be able to read them, it's quite possibly a similar problem.

You could:
Either: take the game back to the shop you purchased it from and ask to swap it, explain to them that the disc wouldn't even register on your computer and therefore you haven't even had a chance to install it.

or: Take it back to the shop, get your money back and pay to download it through the EA downloader. This goes completely around the DVD DRM problem and just moves straight onto having the files on your machine.

or: Try to talk to an EA tech support (Believe me they have a history of not being the most helpful people in the world, however this is usually to the amount of flack that get's delivered to their inbox)

Also, is your drive a DVD/RW?, if so it's possible that the first initial piece of SecureROM protection is not to even register in a drive that burns. I could of course be wrong.

(Incidentally Laptop Graphics cards are unsupported by any EA game, they tend to forget people have laptops and like to make us suffer)

 

I have one question, could I install Spore on another computer and then copy all the files to a thumb drive and transfer it oover to this computer? I know that SimCity 2000 could run without the disc in the drive, can Spore?

 

The whole DRM issue is that Spore is meant to be installed and run without the Disc being in the drive, however I believe it's required to install on the machine you intend to use it on and according to most of the output on the internet you've only 3 attempts at install until it won't let you anymore.

I'd suggest swapping the disc at the store you bought it from or swapping it back for cash to purchase via EA.com and use their downloader. This would more likely resolve the problem.

 

I took a risk and did this and, after almost 2 hours of copying due to very small flash drives, i got it all transferred and it works! Yay

 

Cool! honestly...I didn't think that would work. Glad it did.

I'm currently playing an online game "Vanguard", and one thing I love about it, it's like old school...you can run the exe from the program folder without having to install the game. I just moved the whole vanguard folder over to my laptop and double clicked on the exe and it ran. It was really handy tonight...they just did a big update that was going to take 2 hours to download, so I went over to a friend's house, that lives near by, and just copied his Vanguard "bin" directory, since he had already updated, and ba-da bing! instant update. Really nice.

 

I have the same issue as you. Something with the DRM that EA, in their infinite wisdom, put onto the disk that prevents certain drives from reading it (a very small percentage of drives it appears). The drive just spins and stops, spins and stops, and after a minute windows explorer unfreezes and shows an empty drive. I did the opposite you did, I tried it on my slow laptop and it worked. I'll have to purchase it digitally as mention above. Hope I can return opened software and get my money back.

 

edit: I forgot to mention there is nothing "wrong" with my DVD drive. I use it all the time for movies and DVD games.