Gah.... Reinstall Issues...

[Killian]

...had to take off the program to clean up my system a bit; came to reinstall... no probs... or so I thought...

Now, on running, the game gets as far as cycling through the splash screens; at the screen where it starts to load the game proper, it pings immediately to desktop with no warning or messing about. Starmaker also refuses to work (keeps throwing up that stupid "...has encountered a problem" dialog).

Am running XP SP3; next step is to try and copy the DVD onto my HD and install it from there to see if that has any effect. In the meantime, anyone have any suggestions as to why the stoopid thing is acting whappy and what else I can do to try and fix it?

Cheers

(Frustrated Killy :taz:)

[BiggsTrek]

You might double check the state of your video card drivers. Seems to be the default problem for this software...

Basically, are your graphics drivers up to date?

[Killian]

...cheers, Biggs; I'll try that as well (although it was working fine the other day, it's probably about time I updated 'em anyway)...

[Killian]

either or both of them seemed to work... now it's just the tedious and long winded job of reinstalling all the mods....

[Chris62]

either or both of them seemed to work... now it's just the tedious and long winded job of reinstalling all the mods....

Fun Fun my hard drive just crashed last month i had to also reinstall everything it took me about three days i feel for you.

[Uber]

I shudder to think how long it would take me to reinstall everyting.

[Killian]

It's taken me about 8 hours already to sift, check, reinstall and ensure stuff is working.... it's not something I'd recommend, no :)

Take my advice; ensure you have a properly catalogued backup of EVERYTHING... even the stuff you think you'll probably never use... am already finding things I thought I had and have misplaced (ok, maybe that should be "am already NOT finding things..."); I'm just glad I did a last minute spin through with MED before taking anything off and workspaced most of the stuff I knew I'd need off the bat; saved me a lot of arsing about.

If my install hadn't been all to buggery I'd never have even attempted it in the first place. Having said that, with a fresh install and new drivers, it's looking sweet, running about 10 times faster and I'm not getting random shutdowns of the program, so for me it was worth it. If your installation is fine, take my advice... DON'T TOUCH IT!!! :)

[kuroken]

My suggestion would be pick up something like Acronis True Image Home (http://www.acronis.com/) and just do an image based backup - can stick it on an external drive, or even cds/dvds (lots of them, depending on how big your drive is).

Everything goes bad, you boot off the Acronis cd, point it to the backup file, and an hour later you're back to where you were when you did the backup, before things went bad.

I do a full backup monthly and a weekly differential backup (goes through and backs up every file that's changed or been added since the last backup) every Monday before I leave for work - this has helped when I've overwritten or deleted a file and realize I need the file back the way it was.

Not that expensive, and the time it would take to reinstall all my stuff (not to mention the possibility of losing years of data) makes the money spent well worth it.

Ken

[Norrie]

Have to agree with Ken there.

Backup, backup, backup, people.

I clone weekly to an external (bootable) Firewire Disk. Any problems, boot off external; clone the other way, done.

The only certainty in computing is that your hard disk WILL crash. It's just a matter of when.

[Dulci]

I want to do an off-site backup but I don't want to pick one out randomly through google because I just don't trust anyone.