Something Odd

[Warnevada]

I was playing a PBEM game and something came up where I had to shut down the computer without shutting down what was running.

Now when I try to start the game I get a message "Save file failed to load." I tried re-extracting the save file from WinZip but that made no difference.

Did something get clobbered somewhere?

[DRG]

Sounds like the file was corrupted by the shutdown. It may not have been fully written when it shutdown. Was it a secure game ?

Don

[Warnevada]

Basic security.

What file was corrupted? Not the save file, since restoring it didn't clear the problem.

Am I going to need to reinstall?

[DRG]

likely the main .DAT file for that PBEM. I doubt you will need to re-install the game **unless** this happens with every save game you try to load. If you can load other saved games OK it's just that one

[Mobhack]

It sounds like whatever went wrong corrupted files - probably not just the game related files, either.

Since extracting from the zip file does not work, probably that file was affected as well. Try extracting the copy of the zip file in the email attachment from your opponent, overwriting the zip on your disk perhaps?. That could replace the zip with a known good copy. Or, if it was the zip in the email attachment you extracted from - ask your opponent to resend it once more.

But it sounds as if you should run windows CHKDSK utility to check your drive for lost clusters etc. after that crash. Perhaps leave it running overnight with the option to check the surface for bad sectors selected too (that one takes a while, a few hours, which is why I suggest an overnight run. Maybe wait and if the first run of CHKDSK throws up errors, only then run it again with the surface check option selected).

[Warnevada]

It might have been related to the OS because today everything works OK. Thanks for the hand holding.