CD-Rom won't read my warcraft cds...

Help me out with one or the other problem in order to fix my actual problem:

If I leave my computer on for extended periods of time (and I often need to because I do jobs (computer processes) that take several hours. I also just do it because I've always done it), my warcraft 3 cds won't work. It's an odd situation: the cd reads, the autoplay works, and I can browse the cd and interact with the menu, including watching previews of upcoming Blizzard games.

However when I click 'Play WC3TFT', it gives me an error saying that the cd is not in the drive. This problem is solved by rebooting.

What's going on?

The second problem is a thought I had to fix the above problem: creating an image file of the cds and hosting them on my computer. I will then use daemon tools to create virtual cds. However when I used winISO to make a cd image from the game cds, the cd images fail to work; I get the same error.

What's going on?

I think Warcraft CDs have CD protection of some sort on them, so you need to use software that can bypass that or create perfect copies when creating images, such as CloneCD. You'll also need to emulate one of the protection modes in Daemon Tools, though you'll have to look up on the Internet which one Warcraft uses for it's discs.

As for it not being recognised as being in the drive, I think that's a bug in Autoplay in Windows (certainly on older versions of Windows), and I think turning it off in Device Manager and/or TweakUI helps. What version of Windows do you have anyway?

I get that CD is not in the drive thing all the time. Does it pop up with three options to choose from?

Try again, Cancel and Continue? I always just hit continue and sit for a few seconds, then it loads. I get that problem with Warcraft, Diablo, Quake 3, and both of my Jedi games. I think it's an XP thing.

WinXP Professional Ver 2002 SP1

I'm going to try to get clonecd now. I'll report back so that m4tt b4tt can get some closure as well

I used to get that when I first had the D2 expansion, it was cause I had a different version of the normal version than the expansion.

I'm still getting the problem; how do I uninstall/remove autoplay?

Hold down Shift once you put the CD in and it'll bypass autoplay.