I have the Age of Empires II Gold Edition which contains both Age of Empires II and the Conquerors discs. I have lost the Conquerors disc, so I am trying to play just Age of Empires II. However, on my laptop, if I run the Age of Empires II (not the expansion), it tells me "Please Insert the correct cd rom", despite having the correct CD in. This only occurs on my laptop. On my desktop, the game runs when using the same CD, so it's not a damaged CD.
I have tried uninstalling the game and installing without the Conquerors expansion in case it is trying to launch the expansion pack, but even then it gave the same error.
What could cause this error? Google says it's either a pirated disc (which it isn't) or a damaged disc (which it also isn't since it runs on the other computer). What other issues could cause it?
Best Answer
Aside from the obvious cleaning already mentioned, games from the Age of Empires II era had annoying copy protection that relied on putting garbage data in areas of the CD that weren't technically within the CD-ROM specification in question (ISO9660, I think?).
Your optical drive would be asked by the copy protection software to read out the data in these invalid areas to see if it matches what it's supposed to... the idea was that simply copying the files from one CD to another to pirate the game wouldn't bring the purposefully-bad sectors with it.
The major flaw with this plan is that some CD drives are "smart" enough to not bother reading the gibberish or attempt to error-correct it, resulting in a disc that won't validate as genuine, even if it is.