$200 dollars.

[Bradley Dick]

That's the price tag of the new hard drive that I don't have the money to buy. I installed 1.03 on my PC. The next day, my computer began to hang and lock up. Then it just froze completely and wouldn't load windows. Restarts wouldn't load windows. System Restore wouldn't work. The troubleshooting steps I tried only led me to "Irrecoverable error" messages from windows repair about my hard drive.

I have had zero problems with my computer prior to this. It is only a year old. I installed the patch. Began having hang-ups and issues that are attributed with bad hard drives. It is now beyond repair or further diagnosis. I have to replace the hard drive.

I don't know if this is at all related to your game, but that's the only change that had happened to my computer in several weeks.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Bradley Dick

From my school's library.

[Meach]

Ouch, sorry to hear that

[Andro]

A hard disk death cant be a software realted problem. Its a livetime thing, old things go down after a while. CMSF cant kill your HD.

[Madmatt]

As mentioned above, this is just an unfortunate happenstance. There is nothing that a game could/would do to cause a full hardware fault like this.

Also, harddrives usually don't just DIE all at once (but it can happen). Normally you will notice that they begin to fail a little bit at a time and these failures exhibit themseleves as software crashes, long load/access times or seemingly random Windows crashes and error messages.

As a drives physical surface sectors go bad or grow more corrupted these errors occur more and more often and eventually you get a total fault where the drive becomes completely inaccessable.

An old technicians trick (I was a hardware tech before I became a network engineer before I then worked for Battlefront) is to take a bad drive and stick it in your freezer overnight. Take it out the next day and hook it up to your computer. In many cases you will get the drive to boot up long enough to backup files and folders to a spare drive.

Something about the cold causing the disk sirface to contract and become *readable* I guess, but its a temporary fix at best and not always reliable.

By the way, 200 bucks for a new drive? You got robbed! You should be able to pick up a brand new 500 GB drive for just a little over 100 bucks, and smaller drivers are even cheaper.

Madmatt

[Sitting Duck]

Actually, might want to make that $245...

This situation brings up the opportunity to address something I had a question about...

If BD had licensed his copy of CMSF prior to the hard drive crash, then how can he now unlicense his copy of CMSF?

I presume if he had a backup and restored from tape he'd be fine, but absent that...what? Would he need to spend $45 for a new copy (hence my $245 suggestion)? Or just be limited to his single remaining license?

[Hawkmek]

Do you have another drive you can install as your boot drive?

Put in a backup hard drive, or new, load windows, boot up with your "bad" hard drive as secondary and see if you can get some life out of it. Be sure to change the jumper to slave.

If it truly is bad, it won't work now either. If it does show up in BIOS, and you can access it in windows, get all the data you need off of it and go from there.

Like the guys above said, they usually don't crash 'all the sudden', they exhibit signs of failure prior to their final gasp.

Good luck

[thelmia]

Yeah, I have the same question. I have a copy of CMSF that I never uninstalled before reformatting. What do I do to get that copy unlisenced? I am going to get a new computer someday soon.

[Madmatt]

Each license allows two concurrent installs/activations so normally when someone replaces their drive during an emergency they still have 1 activation left over. In fact thats the reason you get two, but if both are in use and something bad happens, simply email elicense@battlefront.com, explain EXACTLY what has happened and why you can no longer access the install on your old computer/drive and if you can also include the code itself or at least the name the order was placed under and the approximate date that you placed your order and we can work with you to get the matter resolved in a fair manner.

Madmatt

[Battlefront.com]

Ouch! Sorry to hear that. As Matt said usually problems have been building up over time as the drive gets more out of alignment, a component wears out, etc. I had two Sony CD/DVD products that failed slowly over time. At first I thought it was just a dirty or slightly scratched disk that caused the problem. Then I thought it was manufacturing issues, then it got so bad that it was rejecting some things one day and not the next. Then they simply wouldn't work at all. Come to find out that Sony had already settled a class action lawsuit because just about EVERY laser disk based product they made about 6 years had a defective part that degraded over time and caused the laser to be misaligned a little bit more each time.

Anyway... just an example of how something can go bad slowly and at first not noticing. More relevant last week I had a modification date of one file show up incorrectly. I checked my drive and found directory errors and I corrected them. Had I not noticed that bunged up date the problems would have gotten worse and worse.

Steve

[Bradley Dick]

I honestly don't think that Battlefront was responsible for my HD failure. Just an unfortunate coincidence, I think. And I was enjoying the game too, it's a damned shame.