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Sunday, February 22, 2009

post://8133353976599970085/

I had my main system drive in RAID striping (no data protection) and sure enough one of the drives went screwy. I had a system backup that I made with Vista Ultimate so I wasn't that wary of reinstalling. I could pop in the new drive, insert the windows disk and restore, one of the bennefits of Ultimate!

It wasn't like that, not at all - in order to restore off of one of those Windows Image Backups you need to have the same drive configuration as before. My drives were different - so no go.

I finally reinstalled fresh to a new drive (no RAID on the system drive this time) then I got all the files I needed off the original RAID setup which was still limping along good enough for me to get my data. I was sure I had everything but I was about to find out otherwise.

I started up GTA and it asked me to activate. Ok I can activate, I clicked ok - nada, some error with infrastructure and all that. I realized I needed to reinstall so that got me thinking of my savegames and how I should probably go back them up in case the reinstall tried to overwrite them. I made a backup of my Rockstar Games folder in Documents but as I poked around in there I didn't see any savegame files. I also didn't see anything in the new Vista c:\Users\X3\Saved Games folder.

I did some research and realized I had lost them. I needed the files in c:\Users\X3\Local Settings\Application Data\Rockstar Games\... and since I was using XBox Live for Windows and it encrypts the savegames (to prevent people from cheating) I also needed the files in c:\Program Files(x86)\XLive
I've lost save games before and I know there are sites around that have a save at virtually every misssion in the game, but how would that work in this case?

After some more searching I found something that would let me load the save files into the reinstalled version:
HowTo for Savegame "wrapper"

Original Site

I'm going to go look for savegame collections now. If I can't reply my game with all my carefully molded relationsihips I can at least play out the missions and get the rest of the story.

Damn it!

[Update - 2/23/2009] - I found them! I'll post the link once I get home, but I've found a site with all the missions, and the link for the wrapper above works. Now I can get as close as I can to where I left off - of course the relationships, the races, the pidgeons, the stunt jumps, who knows how they did with those but I can only hope for the best and try and finish the game, albeit from someone else's skin.

Labels: games, games for windows, lament, lost data

posted @ 14:02

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Wednesday, January 17, 2007

post://6923565153987674439/

So the data restore didn't work. I tried a bootable CD ISO I found, I tried the program that I mentioned in the shareware and got my old VISTA information. I had formatted the drive that had VISTA on it and copied over all my Documents.

In any case nothing worked so I installed:
Wing Commander Prophecy (It's recommended you have a 3DFX to play)

I found a few files that enable Wing Commander: Prophecy to play on Windows XP and boom, all the weird skipping and interlaced videos went away. It's actually a really fun game. I don't think I've ever gotten this far, and it's been a long time since an X-Wing like video game came along.

I actually have a working, calibrated joystick now, too - so it's a blast.

Labels: lost data, Wing Commander

posted @ 20:44

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post://1838882063413536194/

I may be jumping the gun, but there are many many files left to scan so I've got to do something. One of my SATA HDs crashed, my first 80Gig Western Digital. It appears the HD is technically OK because S.M.A.R.T. wasn't triggered but I can't get anything off it.

Normally I just say "oh well" and do without, but this time I really needed to make sure I got all the data off it. My "My Documents" folder happened to be on this particular drive, so there are various cracks, save game files, configuration files, and other bits that I can't remember that I may be missing out on.

I always see a ton of Data Recovery files, but the last time I actually had to recover data was when my Mac HD went, and that's an entirely different set of tools.
I purposely scoured Majorgeeks.com for some FREEWARE and I think I just said "uh oh" aloud.

At the bottom of my window which is currently identifying all the files I may potentially have to do without is "Unlicensed Evaluation Copy" - even though it was listed as FreeWare. Oh dear.

Well I'll let you know how it goes. I may just have to remove the link to this program if it wasn't free. I was just about to praise them for their wonderful humanitarian effort. .:sigh:.

Labels: crash, lost data

posted @ 18:15

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