Micro$oft Arithmetic

[GlobalHobo]

I had a hard-drive failure last week. The good news is that between back-ups and getting a few more dying spins from the HD, I was able to recover a fair amount of stuff. The bad news is that I lost all my C-54 research, so I'll have to start all over on that. Back-up, back-up, back-up. Aaaaanyway...

I have no clue what to think after reinstalling FS9. After the install, CD in drive, I fired it up, adjusted the basic settings and did a quick check. Everything worked fine. Next step was to install the 9.1 patch, which gave me no trouble in my last install. CD still in the drive, I tried to fire it up, but got this:




To which I thought, "Duh. Twice as much. So what." The computer just stared back at me impassively. FS9 just hung and steadfastly refused to start. I rebooted the computer and tried again. Same result. I uninstalled FS9, scrubbed all mentions of it from the registry (Micro$oft says it deletes all references from the registry during the uninstall process, but I found at least a dozen entries still in there, which I manually deleted.) I reinstalled, with the same result.

Any ideas? Could it be the patch, or is there some other sinister plot afoot? A hardware issue? All I've done is re-load WinXP-SP3 back on the computer. It's nothing fancy. Dual-core Pentium with integrated graphics and sound. A conflict with... what? MSOffice is the only other thing on the computer so far.

[Fozzer]

Following the HDD crash, are you re-installing the Win XP OS and other programs, on a NEW HDD, or back on the original faulty HDD?

Paul...recent HDD crash..now a new HDD!

[GlobalHobo]

New 200GB Seagate drive

[Fozzer]

As you haven't got much on there at the moment, how about re-installing Win XP SP3 again from scratch, just in case the registry has mucked up with removing various entries?

Start all over again?

Paul... ...!

Weep for me!

[GlobalHobo]

Kinda what I was thinking, but I was wondering if anyone had seen this before. It's odd.

[GlobalHobo]

Well, I'm happy to report that, so far at least, all seems to be well again in FSLand. I did not have to wipe my drive (something I was not looking forward to, given the length of time it took to apply all the updates to the OS).

I'd still like to know for sure what that was all about, but probably a dedicated MS Computer Expert would be unable to tell me for sure. I'm going to go with the 9.1 update as the source of the silliness, because after the current re-install, I downloaded the update straight from the Microsoft site, rather than using the one on my "Must Have" back-up CD, and there have, so far, as I said earlier, been no problems. It's even working with the NoCD patch. Mystery, apparently, solved. Though it's still a mystery to me.

Now comes the (not insignificant) task of reinstalling all the bits and pieces that make it my own little refuge from reality. (As real as it gets? Nah. Even better!)

Paul, thanks for the moral support. From reading your tale of woe, I think yours was the much more painful experience.

[aeroart]

Glad you're getting back in business. To make recovery easier in the future, it might be worth investing in an external drive and save the entire the FS folder.

Art