Nexuis corrupted harddrive?

[Gooberz]

Hello. This afternoon I was playing Nexuiz, and changed the video settings. The game seemed to close, and then open again, and then completely locked up my computer. It seemed to go into a loop, so I restarted it. At startup, it wanted to check the secondary harddrive (The one Nexuiz had been installed to), so I let it. About half an hour later I decided that it was deleting way too much stuff, and restarted it agian. Once I was logged in, I couldn't access the secondary harddrive. I fear I've lost years of my life with that harddrive. Is this something that has happened before? Is there a way to fix it?

My PC's specs:
OS: Windows 2000
RAM: 1 gig (Two 512mb cards)
Card: x86 based
Graphics card: ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
Harddrives: Primary 90 gig, secondary 250 gig (Burned out)


I can only assume that Nexuiz did this, because that was the only program running other than Xfire and AIM, both of which were installed to the Primary harddrive.

[C.Brutail]

No, Nexuiz woulld only WRITE stuff on your hard drive, and only to /data/dlcache
The thing that deleted all your stuff is the lame windows scandisk, that started on startup.
If you haven't touched any files on that partition, use getdataback for ntfs to get your files back.

And next time, use a REAL disk scanner program to fix filesystem problems.

[esteel]

I really doubt you can blame Nexuiz for this.. The one time Nexuiz WRITES data to disc (the only time it could possible damage data) is when its closed savely and all data it does write is a small config files about 2-5 kb in size.
Oh and yeah C.Brutail is right, when you download external maps thats an other time when is saves things but i doubt this happened to you..
ATI has some bad drivers that are know to crash with some things but i guess there is nothing we can do about this, as their drivers are just buggy.

I have no idea what you mean with 'it was deleting way too much stuff ( during checking)' but if you restart your computer while checkdisc or something similar is running without closing it nicely thats (sorry) just totally possible to be your problem as it might indeed mess with valuable data during operation. And i guess you now suffer the results of that action.
However if it really did delete much stuff you problaby had problems on disc already or that checkdisc did just go totally nuts..

[C.Brutail]

I'll send you a private message, check it out.

[Psychcf]

well, I'd follow this list of things to do:

** DO NOT TRY TO USE THE DRIVE AT ALL!!! **

If you want to get files back, don't read anything, don't write anything. Windows is dumb and therefore I am assuming there's some writing involved in certain tasks that really only require reading.

1. Recover anything you can. Use a program, or a service, whatever. Get the most important stuff back. I personally use ddrescue. Get even some stuff that may be unaltered. If possible recover everything on the drive, and put it on a backup disk or something. Don't put it on another partition, put it on a separate disk.

2. fix the file system. Use a linux live CD. I reccomend this one: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

3. Check to make sure everything is ok. if you have MD5s, check them. Make sure all the important stuff opens up.

4. Make a backup. Go out to best buy, and get yourself a nice big 400 gig drive. Put everything you own on it.

[divVerent]

OK, I had the same problem (Nexuiz repeatedly opening and closing) on Vista when changing the video settings. Apparently something Nexuiz does does not work on Vista any more. Using the SDL binary helped against this problem.

About the lost data - well, that was caused by you resetting the computer while it apparently did something - and be it expanding its swap file. NEVER switch off the computer while it is doing something on the hard drive - I know no file system that reliably can take that without damage. I know many file systems that USUALLY survive this (UFS2+Softupdates, ext3, ReiserFS) - but NTFS is not one of them.

You should instead have tried all you can do to force a "clean" shutdown:

• first of all, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete and try to close the offending task. This did NOT work for me on Vista because the task manager never got input focus, whatever I tried.
• secondly, press the power button ONCE and SHORT. This causes a clean shutdown on current systems. Oh, and that worked for me.
• as a third desperate attempt, you can try using the Sleep button on your keyboard if you have one. If you manage to put it to sleep that way, press reset THEN
• only if all this failed, touch the reset button or the power button for five seconds

I can assure it was not Nexuiz breaking the file system simply because the code does not access the hard drive directly enough for that. This rather sounds like a typical case of file system corruption caused by an unclean shutdown.

[Psychcf]

I don't know if you are using linux, but just to let you know the 3g-ntfs driver makes it so it takes windows a little bit longer to load. I seem to get a black screen for about 15-20 seconds, and then it comes up with the splash screen.

DivVerent is definatly right here, it was a dumb idea to do that. Good luck anyway I guess...

[divVerent]

BTW, to explain the sleep button idea - there are actually two caches involved - the operating system's cache, and the hard drive's cache. A journaling file system basically ensures that the file system is in a "somewhat consistent" state at any time, assuming the hard drive's cache has been written. The OS has no influence over when the HDD's cache gets written to the disk.

Softupdates, as FreeBSD uses, basically ensure that the OS's cache gets written to disk in an order that guarantees some consistency requirements. Journaling adds additional data with which the file system can be returned to a consistent state on next bootup if the OS crashed. But both techniques expect the HDD cache to get flushed even in case of emergency - so basically, they prevent damage in case the OS crashes, but not in case the power goes down.

And now that is the idea of the sleep trick: if you manage to put the computer to sleep, the hard drive cache gets flushed for sure and the file system should be more likely in a consistent state. Also, if you can somehow can stop the HDD activity - do that before pulling the power. Also, prefer the RESET button over pulling the plug - it MAY still cause the HDD cache to get flushed after some seconds. IIRC on some operating systems, there are special keyboard combintions to force a soft reset - on Windows 9x it was hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del repeatedly, on Linux it is Alt-SysRq-U, then Alt-SysRq-S, then Alt-SysRq-B. Prefer that over the buttons. Not sure if a similar feature exists on XP.

If you manage to cause the HDD cache to be flushed, you basically have won - the OS's journaling or softupdates should take care of the rest on next bootup and the FS should be in a working state. NTFS is not always in good shape when doing that, but fore sure in better shape than when not flushign.

[torus]

IIRC on some operating systems, there are special keyboard combintions to force a soft reset - on Windows 9x it was hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del repeatedly, on Linux it is Alt-SysRq-U, then Alt-SysRq-S, then Alt-SysRq-B.

On my Power Macintosh 6100 in OS 8 (old school ), this was done by repeatedly smacking the top of the monitor, while shouting profanities at it. It worked most of the time actually.

[C.Brutail]

So Gooberz, wtf has happened to all your data?