Where is my add on scenery gone?

[tinpusher]

Hello all.
My add on scenery in FS9 is completely gone!
It is still in the FS9 foldertree but not showing in the scenery library.
So I have to reinstall everything again each time I fire up FS9.
It is a phenomenon which occurred only a couple of days ago.
I did not load anything, nor altered FS9 at all . FS9 is running with disc #4 inserted.
The scenery library shows an Area #6 named "Add on scenery", but I cannot remember if it has been there all the time; I never noticed it before.....
Any suggestions???
Thanks in advance.

[garymbuska]

Hello all.
My add on scenery in FS9 is completely gone!
It is still in the FS9 foldertree but not showing in the scenery library.
So I have to reinstall everything again each time I fire up FS9.
It is a phenomenon which occurred only a couple of days ago.
I did not load anything, nor altered FS9 at all . FS9 is running with disc #4 inserted.
The scenery library shows an Area #6 named "Add on scenery", but I cannot remember if it has been there all the time; I never noticed it before.....
Any suggestions???
Thanks in advance.

I am not trying to be funny here but your scenery is wherever you saved it at. FS9 has no way of knowing where to put any file so if you just dragged it to the main folder of FS9 then it will more than likely be at the bottom of the file. If you put it in the Scenery folder than it will be at the bottom of that folder.
FS9 always puts any new scenery you add at the bottom of the scenery cfg file which can sometimes create a problem if you have the same area defined with a higher priority the scenery you add will be added after the other scenery is added and cause undesirable effects such as your plane appearing in the middle of a hanger or terminal building.
If you follow what I like to call standard saving habits you first put your scenery file in a folder someplace outside of FS9 then move the files to where you want them at.
I advise to never save any thing straight into any version of FS.
This is how things get messed up.
I know FS9 has a section called ADDON SCENERY put that does not mean that you must put any extra scenery there. You can also put it in a separate folder in the main scenery folder.
You have to remember that FS9 will not automatically add scenery that is in the Addon Scenery folder you must activate it manually.
What I like to do is to make separate folders inside of the Addon scenery folder with a meaningful file name EXAMPLE if I am adding files for say Houston Texas than I make a folder called HOUSTON_TEXAS and then create the separate scenery and texture folders inside of that folder all .BGL files will need to go to the scenery folder and other files if any will go in the texture folder than crank up FS9 and use the add new scenery option to activate it.

[tinpusher]

Hi Gary,
Thanks for your reply.

As a use I always unzip addon scenery into a new folder before inserting it in FS9's addon scenery folder; exactly as you describe it.
The addon scenery is then activated (red tickmarks) in sequence in the scenery library.
I restart FS9; "Building files for new scenery" appears in the opening screen,and after loading evertything works fine for a couple of sessions.

However every now and then after starting FS9 the opening screen shows "Building files for new scenery" and it appears that all addon scenery folders in the scenery library have vanished!!
In C/Program Files (X86)/Microsoft Games/Flight Simulator9/Addon scenery they still are all there. (As they should be).
This puzzles me and I do not know the reason or how to fix this.
It gives me a pain to have to reload 64 addon folders again and again.

Regards
Ron

[Fozzer]

Hi Gary,
Thanks for your reply.

As a use I always unzip addon scenery into a new folder before inserting it in FS9's addon scenery folder; exactly as you describe it.
The addon scenery is then activated (red tickmarks) in sequence in the scenery library.
I restart FS9; "Building files for new scenery" appears in the opening screen,and after loading evertything works fine for a couple of sessions.

However every now and then after starting FS9 the opening screen shows "Building files for new scenery" and it appears that all addon scenery folders in the scenery library have vanished!!
In C/Program Files (X86)/Microsoft Games/Flight Simulator9/Addon scenery they still are all there. (As they should be).
This puzzles me and I do not know the reason or how to fix this.
It gives me a pain to have to reload 64 addon folders again and again.

Regards
Ron

Now that is REALLY strange!..... ...!

I suppose you are already familiar with the required trick in Windows 7, of; "clicking in the add-on window" each time you have "added" a folder, to make sure that all the folders are actually added to the Library so that they all appear in the final scenery list!

Otherwise, its a total mystery to me why it doesn't work!

Very peculiar!

Paul... ...!

[tinpusher]

Hi Paul,
Just read your post and yes it is really strange.
It happens every time when I shut down the computor, it seems that FS9 loses its addon scenery settings there and then.....
The causes that may have affected this I think are probably 1.recently installed (and run) CC Cleaner and 2. recently installed Silver Wings.

The strangest experience now is while flying for instance from Ibiza to Palma de Mallorca (both in addon scenery Balearics) and for instance from Duxford (addon) to Luton (default) and I select the map in the drop down menu my screen turns black and FS is stopped, disc 4 is running like mad, trying to repair an unknown problem and starts up again from scratch.

The only thing left is uninstall FS9 and build it up again when I find the time.

The reason why I posted this is that I hoped that someone had encountered a simliar issue and had the solution on hand.
Thanks anyway.
Regards,
Ron

[garymbuska]

I had this same thing happen to me and you are not going to like the cause of this But This could be a sign of your hard drive failing. It drove me crazy trying to figure out what was going on files and entire programs were just disappearing on me and I got no errors at all I had to replace my hard drive and the problem was solved. If this is your system drive I hope you have a copy of Windows As you will have to completely replace everything. Not something I would wish on anyone.

[tinpusher]

Hi Gary,
Your answer sounds quite alarming.
It urges me to copy the entire contents of my Cdrive to an externe HDD, lest I lose important infomation in my computer.
Thank you.
Ron

[garymbuska]

Hi Gary,
Your answer sounds quite alarming.
It urges me to copy the entire contents of my Cdrive to an externe HDD, lest I lose important infomation in my computer.
Thank you.
Ron

You are quite welcome
If this is your system drive you will have to reinstall Windows or if you are lucky you can restore from a system image.
I have never done this before so I am not sure if that will work without having to reinstall windows first.
If this is a store bought computer I hope it came with a restore CD or is in warranty if not you will have to buy a copy of windows as Microsoft will not give you a key to unlock the copy of windows you have now.Trust me as I have gone down that road before.
This is the main reason I build my own system now so I have a version of windows.
Of course being it is windows 8 it is a OEM version as I could not update my old version as I went from a 32 bit to a 64 bit system and there is no update for that.
I always thought if your hard drive had a problem it would let you know and you would start seeing read or write errors But in my case there was nothing. I would install FSX and then when I went to run it it would come up with a file not found error. I would look on my hard drive and it was not there. but yet the program would show up in the add remove section. It drove me nuts trying to figure out what was happening. And the real crazy thing is I used Check disk and it found no errors at all. So lucky me I had installed FSX on a second drive. I than went and bought a third drive and it solved the problem so I was able to copy the rest of the stuff from the bad drive to the new drive and than removed the old drive.