Clicking noises...
 

So I've got myself a Dell Inspiron 9100, figuring it could play some games, and I received Far Cry from a friend for my birthday. So, I go to install it, and I can get through the first of five CDs fine, but when it tells me to switch to the second, I put it in, and my drive proceeds to make these weird clicking and whirring noises.

My drive works for everything else, except for my Madden NFL 2004 CDs, same problem, but I wasn't as concerned as I am now. My comp just doesn't like some CDs I guess... any ideas? I hope they don't get too technical, I skipped most of my computer classes, hehe.

Thanks for any information.

are the CD's *legit*?

i had an older computer that would not read CD-Rs. and another that could only read certain "types" of CD-Rs....

if they are legit, i'd think it would be a hardware problem in light of the "weird clicking and whirring noises" you mention.

you could try to disable the autoplay on the drive and then see if you can open it via "my computer"....

otherwise, contact Dell.

I first thought that possible copy-protection on cds was stopping you from playing the game (I dunno, maybe some older cd-roms can't read those cds), but you said you want to play Far Cry, so I'm going to assume that you have a fairly new laptop. Any recent computer would have no problem reading cd-r's.

My only guess is that the cd's are burnt and your friend know gave you a cd which wasn't burned correctly or just a bad burn.

My computer (CD-RW) would hang on CD #3 of my store bought FarCry. Tried three times before I just copied all the CD's to my hard drive (through explorer) and installed it off the hard drive. Still need disk one in the CD-RW to play. Works fine though.

Well, the CDs are legit. That I can say. And yes, it's a fairly recent laptop, perfectly capable of playing FarCry should the damn thing choose to not... click.

I'll try copying the CDs to my HD and go that way - thanks for the advice.

Edit: CD 3, when I try to copy through explorer, causes a "cyclical redundancy check" or something like that, and can't be copied. Any thoughts?

Haven't a clue? I remember that disks 1,2,4 and 5 took about 4-5 minutes each to copy but my disk 3 (the same one that locked on install) took about 20 minutes to copy? Have no idea why but it did.

I've been able to copy 1-4 now fine... but CD 5 is a pain, it won't copy the English file, and one other, the data file made it over okay though. I might just have to look for these files elsewhere.

Nobody's got any ideas on where to obtain these files, eh?