WHAT THE @#$%@#$^%@#$^%

[Triple_7]

I have no idea how, what, or when this happened.  I started FS to find my Hong Kong a little flat.  Thought it had something to do with add-on scenery...scenery library revealed a bunch of add-ons gone.  Then I got to looking more.  FS seems to have reverted back to its original fresh out of the box state.  The only thing left where I had it was the display settings, default flight, and VTBS scenery...everything else was wiped out of FS.  Not sure about all the textures yet...will have to take a quick flight and see.  Its all still in the main folders though...it just un-installed itself from FS.  I also lost my custom AFCAD for RCTP that I had spent HOURS working on to line certain aircraft up with certain gates.  Almost had it done...now its back to default >:(  Luckily my AI flight plans are still there...not compiled into FS anymore but at least it didn't wipe them out...All my aircraft are still there too.

I put a lot of work into getting things where I wanted them...now all my add-ons have to be re-installed to FS.  I've never seen this before...what could have caused it.  I just flew this morning without a problem.  Computer was never shut down today.  I just lost hours and hours of work thanks to an unknown something

[born_2_fly]

I had the same thing happen to me.

In the days of FS2002 I had it installed on my rig and for some reason FS started doing the same thing as your problem, but it also began to delete airports in Asia. Suddenly I had no airports in Japan or Korea.  :-?

A fresh FS reinstall may be a good thing. It will clean up a lot of old gauges and effects files  ;)

[Groundbound1]

That su*#$! Sorry for your loss.

[garymbuska]

There is one file you might want to allways keep backed up as you add scenery and that is the scenery.cfg file if you edit this file manually and get something wrong it can go back to a default setting.
I had it happen once myself and it took some time to figure it out.
Sometimes it will rename the orignal file as scenery.bak so look through your files and see if you see this file.
Also if you have to use a auto installer to add the scenery you want make sure the source is realiable as this method of installing scerery can and has ccreated problems as designers do not allways get it correct and FS will do all kinds of strange things as a result of this. 8-)

[Pieter G. Wijtsma]

Something even worse happened to me about a year ago. I came home from work to find FS2004 AND FS2002 gone, every single file. Just vanished, literally into thin air. I never found out what happened.

Just re-installing FS2002 took me about a month (a few hours every night) with all the add-on aircraft, panels, scenery (I let FS2004 be for the time being)...... And you know what? I then made a complete backup of my entire FS2002, 'as installed', on some 12 or 13 CD-ROMs.....Now, when something disappears or goes wrong, I can put it right within a quarter of an hour by copying a few files. Only drawback is, you have to renew those backups once or twice a year if you go on installing add-ons etc.

Depends how large your FS2004 or FS2002 is, though....my 9 GB appears to be about the limit for a backup of this type.

PGW

[MOUSY]

Something even worse happened to me about a year ago. I came home from work to find FS2004 AND FS2002 gone, every single file. Just vanished, literally into thin air. I never found out what happened.

Fozz would tell you that the missus was getting back at you for something you did... or didn't do....

[Layne.]

LOL!

[pepper_airborne]

Sounds like some sort of system restore ore repair thingie kicked in.

[Ivan]

Sounds like some sort of system restore ore repair thingie kicked in.

Messed up system repair... download the scenery again and disable the feature for your FS drive

[garymbuska]

Using system restore is a sure fire way to make all kinds of things seem to dissapear in a hurry. But if you look on the drive that the files were on to start with you will find that they are not gone at all as the system restore feature will not remove any files but it will rename the file and append a number to it so the file will look like this FS2004(1) the number appended to the file will get higher every time it renames the file. Any file you see with a number attach to it like the above is the reult of the system restore feature.

[Triple_7]

Well.  All files were there, just had to be installed back to the Scenery Library...so alls happy now.  Found my AFCAD hiding in a "Compatibility" folder so luckily didn't loose it...especially since I'm heading for Tao-Yuan at the moment.  Everything has been sorted out and some redone.  

Thing is I turned off System Restore the moment I installed Vista.  I have never used it in XP and don't need all these restore points taking my space.  If something goes that bad that the uninstall can't fix it then its time for a full clean.  Restore doesn't even delete the offending files so whats the real point of it :-/

[francsal]

I would agree with that "restore" thing.... funny thing is, when you really need it to restore something... it doesn

[Fozzer]

[quote]I would agree with that "restore" thing.... funny thing is, when you really need it to restore something... it doesn