I rebooted and still saying no driver detected using the starforce removal app. Do you think I have a version of starforce that doesn't install the driver? its protect.exe version 5.0. well I am off to bed I will deal with this tomorrow thanks for the help I appreciate it.

Did you try the no-cd exe yet?

Download one from gamecopyworld and try it out.....what version is your game?

That's good news. It must mean that the Starforce that comes with DoM is the Internet version. The disc version, from what I understand, is still not entirely within safe-to-use boundaries.

I've had Starforce destroy 2 of my disc drives. Oh sure they didn't explicitly pop up a message saying "We got trashed by Starforce", but ever since I cleaned up Starforce, nothing has happened to my 3rd drive. The symptoms that occurred to the other 2 drives - of different brands, different read/write speeds - were more or less the same. I doubt it's a coincidence too.

Starforce doesn't destroy drives in itself - it's an inherent thing in Windows that causes the issue. If it detects multiple read errors on the drive it'll sometimes auto switch it from DMA mode to PIO mode as a precaution, which is both ridiculously resource intensive and dramatically reduces the mechanical lifespan of the drive. As disc copy protection of the time effectively involved damaged sectors on the discs, this resulted in said thing happening with the more intensive ones.

Not making excuses for SF or defending it here, just shedding some technical light on it. On digital downloads with SF on you shouldn't have any hardware issues from it. Software issues are quite something else though.