A very bad oblivion day

[Oruboris]

So I'd been having a few crashes, and was tired of the 'crash on exit' bug.

 

Downloaded the script extender and a certain mod that's supposed to cure most Oblivion crashes, including the crash on exit.

 

Friday, everything was great-- no crashes, everything very stable.

 

Saturday, more crashes than ever.

 

Sunday, oblivion starts to crash a lot, then starts to freeze, and it's never done that before. System manager still works to avoid re-booting. The happens every 10 minutes or so.

 

Then a major crash to black.

 

System restarts, but my primary user account is fried, including several weeks of email, my huge favorite folder, my preferrences, my oblivion mods folder [including quite a lot of stuff no longer available]. I have some of the faves, email addresses etc. on my old machine, but don't relish the hours and hours it will take to get it back to a February save date.

 

Oh yes: should have saved, blah blah. Before you throw stones, is your data backed up more than every 3 months? Have you ever heard of a GAME taking out all your personal data?

 

My other user accounts work, so I'm not inclined to blame Vista or the hardware. Norton AV detects no viruses after a full scan.

 

I've followed the Help pages on how to restore a damaged user account, account reopens, but all the info in it other than HP/Vista defaults is gone.

 

Tried System Restore, but it fails every time [5 attempts] for 'unspecified causes'.

 

Haven't had time to check the game itself, don't know if any of my savegames will have survived.

 

But if I get it running again, I'll live with the consequences of the crash on exit, rather than this 'fix'.

 

Just needed to vent...

[BossDweebe]

The plugin - Fast Exit is what you want for the dread black screen anderror message on exit.

The crash shield plugin does not help with this,and sadly is not a panacea for all crash problems.

I have used Fast Exit since it's release, and it works faultlessly every time.

The only thing you have to watch is that you don't make any game setting changes you don't

want saved before quitting as it re-writes the ini on exit. I also have crash shield installed,

and while it does not stop all crashes I have noticed some occasions where I thought I was

going to lock up I didn't. So maybe it does work. Part of the time.

 

It is very doubtful the other problems you have experienced with your computer would be

the fault of Oblivion. You may not want us to ask "have you ever heard of a game taking out

personal data", but I have to ask. Have you ? Possibly, if it is installed in the same folder.

You don't want to put it on Vista or your hardware. Don't disregard any possibility.

To assume that something is right is the best way to end up :wallbash: ....

 

In regards to Vista. I have read (I use XP) that your game should be installed somewhere other than C:/Programs. Another partition even.

You may already know this, but it is worth a mention.

 

On the topic of backups. A back up on your HD is no back up at all. It has to be external. If

DVD's aren't enough you need a USB HD. It's just a sad fact...

 

People don't ask these questions to throw stones. They ask them, or warn about the consequences,

because - guess what....?

[dezdimona]

The "Boss" is correct. I back up every day,I have Three 4gig flash drives.I learned the hard way too.

[Skolhamarr]

External HardDrive is a better way to back up. Both of you Dez and oruboris you need that... I have 1 TB external hard drive, i back up everything to at least ones a week.. Its also good to have clean Oblivion file if you have the room. I have done things to my own where. I was having problems that need the original files.

 

My whole computer is backed up on that external hard drive

[bben46]

This is sounding more like a power supply problem. When the 5 volt line drops, it begins to lose data in RAM. And if there is a disk write in progress, it is corrupted. If it stays down, the system shuts down, then if the 5 volts comes back up then the system restarts.

 

Te drop in voltage can be caused by any failing component, but if it is only happening while playing Oblivion, my guess is your Video card is drawing too much current for your power supply.

 

The second most likely possibility is a failing hard drive. Again, loss and corruption of data. Run Chkdsk, That might be able to salvage some data.

[gurgelstock]

I backup my entire meshes and textures folder to a seperate drive after every tiny change I commit (and of course after those big ones too ;) ) and I backup my "my games" folder which includes oblivion and fallout 3 saves every day (I try not to forget)

 

And as mentioned above, FastExit2 is a musthave! Once youre playing around with a couple of mods and you will have to start the game 6 times in 3 minutes just to see the changes and quit right away again just to edit some more, you will appreciate not having to wait 5 minutes for that CTD and erroreport every single time youre quitting the game after having only been in there for not even 20 seconds.

 

One more thing about backups: If youre planning on taking the backups with you (for example for a second pc or whatever) DO NOT use an external hard drive. If you carry that thing around long enough you will, and I promise you this, you WILL get the click of death eventually. It has happened twice to me, I didnt learn the hard way, I learned the stupid way! If youre planning on carrying the backups around with you, you should go for a usb stick or if you can afford it, for a ssd hard drive. As long as external hard drives employ the classic reading head, they should NEVER be carried around!

[gotxbrains]

I'm not sure if it would help, because i have very limited experience with vista. But on xp if you loose an account it doesn't seem to entirely delete the account. I accidently deleted an administrator account, went on another one and navigated myself to the user accounts folder and i could basically find every file that was on that account. But i can't ever restore the account so i can get back on it...

[Oruboris]

I've tried chkdsk and the various restore utilities built into Vista, to no avail.

 

I've reloaded my documents etc from my old machine, regret losing the last 3 months of email and pics, but I'm not devestated-- thems the breaks in computerland.

 

Oblivion doesn't want to load and the savegames are definetly gone. I haven't looked at the data files, but hope I can re-cover a couple of the no-longer-available mods.

 

So I'm going to start the game over, AGAIN, without the mods that I suspect caused some of the issues. This was on a laptop, so I'm dubious the power supply was the prob. But I was running at max resolution, max vid quality, and the vid card did get warm. I'd been running these settings, though, and in longer sessions than the one that went nasty.

 

Next time, I'll dial this back a bit, and look for my supplemental cooling pad before I start.

[Oruboris]

A little update:

 

Seems that my moded Oblivion will run, but only out of the damged user account that I was in when it crashed.

 

Odd, since it's installed outside of the user account system and the properties of both shortcuts is the same c:\games\oblivion\oblivionlauncher. It tries to launch from other accounts, gets as far as the select save to load screen, but crashes with a 'Oblivion has stopped working' microsoft announcement.

 

Wierdly, the display setting changes I made in the Oblivion launched in the damaged account don't show up when I launch from my intact account. The savegames do, though. I'd think they were separate installs if the mods weren't in the data files regardless of which User Account I'm using. Having all the settings the same doesn't help, though.

 

Doesn't seem to matter whether I launch into script extender mode or not.

 

I'd like to delete the damaged User Account, but can't until I solve this mystery.