How to lose three hours 'work'

[Loser]

So there I am, diligently working away at my Adamant009 turn which, for various reasons, takes me about three hours. I click End Turn, reassure it that, Yes I do want to end my turn, and I get a "Cannot create file..." error! Ack!

Back up about two hours for the event that led to this, or a few months for the reason that event was possible. I decided a few months ago to clean up my local, 9 gigabyte hard drive. So I moved everything I could to the file server on my little home network. I tried moving SE IV onto the network drive and, lo and behold, it runs fine: Mod Picker works, PBW works, everything. It takes a bit more to get it started, but I notice no other problems.

So today, about an hour into my turn, WinAmp cuts audio and flips down to the end of its list and SE starts telling me it can't find files. Turns out the file server rebooted itself... And it will boot up and serve files, after a minute or two, without intelligent intervention, so there's no telling how long this has been happening.

Well, the server comes back up, WinAmp can find the songs, Space Empires stops yelling at me, and I finish my turn out... Then the yelling starts up again, but with reversed flow.

So much hatred, so little communication.

I played with SE for a while, trying to get it to write that file across the network. I played with XP, but XP didn't have any trouble reading from or writing to the network. I restarted the server while XP was hibernating (I do hibernate the system a lot so I can play a turn over a couple days). Eventually SE just goes away, taking around three hours work and half an hour of frustration with it.

Time to move SE back onto the local machine, I'm thinking. Those 375 megabytes won't kill me, now that I told XP not to use a 1.5 gigabyte swap file. Funny thing is, when I checked the size of the Space Empires folder across the network it said the 'file size' was around 375, but the 'size on disk' was 12.8 gigabytes or so. I'm going to chalk that one up to the proximity or Mars and move on...

[ August 25, 2003, 12:24: Message edited by: Loser ]

[Taz-in-Space]

Sounds like one of those 'Born Loser' moments!

Sorry! Taz couldn't help himself...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

if that's a reference to a movie, it might help if you explained that.

[Cirvol]

Loser, you really need to run a scandisk on those drives! Even using 8k or 64k cluster sizes, 375 meg should never take up 12 gig... thats like 36 times bigger... something seems sick.

Secondly, you should run se4 from a local drive - esp if you have auto-hibernate on...
when a network request goes out to a hibernating machine, it could take 10 seconds for the disk to spin up again... which could cause repeated time out errors for many programs, including se4.

Good luck

[Loser]

Ran scandisk, on both machines. No problems anywhere. I assume there is no problem, just some communication issues... odd ones, but that's nothing new to my little network.

As for the network request, Hibernation is different than Standby. A Hibernating computer is turned off, it just saves the contents of RAM to a file so that everything comes back up when you turn the system back on. Unless it has Wake on LAN that network request is going to go completely unheard. I do not serve files from the Hibernating machine, it shares nothing. I also do not allow it to Hibernate on it's own, I have always controlled when my machines turn on and off, controlled it as much as I could, anyway.

Either way, I've got Diablo II, Medieval Total War, and the Viking Invasion Expansion and a seven hundred megabyte file for Hibernation taking up way too much space on my system right now. I'll move SE back to my system shortly, I suppose, but first I'll have to decided which of those two games I'm ditching. Probably Total War... I wonder if I can run that across the network...

Maybe mapping the Space Empires share as a network drive would work better... Or something.

[deccan]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
if that's a reference to a movie, it might help if you explained that.

It's a comic strip!