Great Campaigne cut short

[sassbarman]

The year was 1207, my faction was the HRE, and it was my most interesting and challenging campaigne to date. I had eliminated the french and the danes, england was reduced to their island and I held all of northern italy and poland, pommern and prussia. I was at war with Italy, hungry and the turks and I was allied to aragon and sicily. The aragonese and a weak spain were in a desperate stuggle against the newly spawned almohad and a very powerfull egypt. England was actually trying to conquer scotland and ireland and were not foolishly trying to come after me, and the turks had conquered byzantium and most of novograd.My battles with the turks in particular were amazing with both sides inflicting heavy damage on the other. I was reduced to one descent general against an endless stream of very capable turkish leaders and the most challenging element of all was the complete absence of peasant units in the turkish armies. For the first time, not to sound cocky, I had serious doubts to the outcome of this war and it was great All was as it should have been in my little medieval world. Then foolishly I attempted to defrag my harddrive with the stupid windows defrag utility and my system froze and all I could do was shut the power off. I guess files where lost and my system wouldn't boot up it turns out my OS became corrupt which you guessed it meant reformatting the HD and reinstalling my OS. In the face of all the adversity I was about to face all I could think of was the sad fact that I wasn't going to be able to finish my silly little game, now thats hardcore. Sorry for the sob story but I just needed a shoulder to cry on my girlfriend isn't very sympathetic to my plight.

[chunkynut]

That sucks big time m8 I defraged only 3 days ago and i have alot of stuff thats not backed up(defraged fine tho).

How many people have had this same problem with defrag??

PS what Windows vers was it?

[Cazbol]

When I buy computers I always order them with 2 hard disks. One small © with the OS and possibly some other related crap. The other is BIG and is for the interesting stuff, i.e. games, games and all the other games. That way I can format the C-drive without losing my prescious games.

As for defrag, I must admit I havn't used it for years. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/dizzy.gif

[Alrowan]

arg.. sounds horrible... ive never had lost files while defragin, but about backing up.... well i havent done that in months... time to get the old burner spinning

[hoom]

You don't need two harddrives.
You can partition your bigger one to give you a small partition (I use ~5gb) to have windows + swapfile on.
Then you install all your games on the larger partition/s so that when you have to reinstall your os, you can just reinstall the games over the top of the previous installation and there's your savegame http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

I actually use a Ghost image with my personalised settings main programs preinstalled and everything as uptodate as possible at the time of making the image.
Normally I'll update the image after bringing stuff fully up to date after using it and before reinstalling peripheral programs...

[Puzz3D]

sassbarman,

It seems to me that you could have reinstalled the os without reformatting the drive. You would want to run scandisk before reinstalling.

I like the idea of using a second drive for backing up the first with Norton Ghost or some program like that. The second drive protects you from both software and hardware failure of the first drive. Of course, the backup has to be done fairly often to stay current and you want to scan your system for viruses before backing up. If you don't mind the prospect of reinstalling everything if you do have a failure, then an alternative is to save irreplacable data files like savegames on some removable media such as a Zip disk.

[hoom]

Yes, I normally actually keep my image on a different drive too http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[A.Saturnus]

Well, I got a new HD. I wanted to install them both, copy all my files on the new one and take the old one out. But somehow, I must have deformed a pin of the old HD. So when I started next time, the HD had only 38 pins. I guess that killed it. Now, the HD is unreadable, no matter what I do with the pin.
The most of the important stuff is backed up on zip discs but all my MTW campaigns were lost http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/frown.gif
Fortunately, the new HD works fine.

[Mori Gabriel Syme]

Sorry about your game, sassbarman; that's really heartbreaking.

As a general observation, I've noticed that XP doesn't fragment files anywhere near as much as Win98 did. I used to degragment '98 almost weekly. Though I occassionally look at the graph in Defrag, I've needed to defragment my new computer's drive only once in four months.

[Puzz3D]

A.Saturnus,

That's really bad luck to break a pin like that, and very hard to fix because it's almost impossible to unsolder the whole header on the disk drive and replace it without causing damage to the printed circuit board. You could try something as a temporary fix if you're daring. Buy a 40 pin header and plug it into the unused socket on the disk cable. Solder a wire from the bottom of the pad of the broken pin on the disk drive's printed circuit board to the correct pin on the 40 pin header. If there are 2 pins broken, you'll have to do the same for the second pin. Plug the other connector (these cables has two drive connectors) into the broken disk drive, and attach the other end to the second IDE controller port on the mainboard. You should probably tape up the exposed cable header so it doesn't short out against the case. You'll need a fine point soldering iron and thin solder to do this without causing unwanted solder bridges since those pads are very close together. You'll need one of those tools to suck up solder if you do happen to create an unwanted bridge.

One thing I've learned is to never use a lot of force when attaching these connectors. If one seems to be hard to push on, I always remove it and visually check the pins for alignment. You can straighten these pins out without breaking them with long nose pliers if the pin hasn't been bent too far. As careful as I try to be it still happens. I remember bending a cpu pin so badly that I figured I could never straighten it out, but luckily it did straighten without breaking. Also, I'd be a little concerned if there was a broken pin floating around inside my computer or maybe the pin is still in the socket on the cable connector.

[BDC]

I haven't ever had a problem with defragging, do it regurly despite having XP and the new file system (NTSF or something) which is much better. Must be so annoying to lose it, mine will crash at the best times after the huge battle when I haven't saved for decades normally http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/mecry.gif

[A.Saturnus]

Thanx Puzz3D, but it`s hopeless. I already straightened the pin and it`s not broken, but the HD still doesn`t respond.