Alright. So...I\'ve got a bit of a problem.

It\'s a lot like this:

The other day, I was playing URU: Ages Beyond Myst. I had finished 3 of the 4 \"Bahro Ages\" and shut down for the night. After waking up the next morning, I completed the final ages(s). Edar Kimo/Gera.

For those who have beaten the game, you all know what comes next. So, I returned to Gahressen to return the Bahro pillar. I did that just fine. I then proceeded to drop out of the Bahro caves--through the hole as was intended--and trouble struck.

Out of the blue, my computer reset itself. I watched the long, boring startup process, now with a new screen. I always treated those the same as an End User Agreement. I just pressed F2 to continue.

So, I reload my game. Due to the way Uru records the player\'s progess, I lost nothing. I had sucessfully returned a Bahro pillar. I then tried to link to Teledahn to do the same for another age. It locked up on me, and even ending the process with Task Manager did nothing for me. I was forced into a hard reset.

Again I waded through the startup, still with it\'s new screen. I loaded the game again and returned the Bahro pillar. The computer again reset.

Again I load it, I don\'t even get linked to Relto! Relto being the place where you start everytime you play the game. The computer restarted the minute this happened.

This time, I read the new screen. At first my father was suspicious of the name of the company: \"American Megatrends\". We checked it out, they\'re clean. Regardless, I read the bottom part. The only part that made sense.

There was soemthing about the hard drive, about it using the S.M.A.R.T. system, and then...

I didn\'t want to believe it. I couldn\'t believe it. Again I rand my game, it crashed on me again in another place called Kadish Tolesa.

My father is of the opinion that the problem lies, either in the CD-ROM my game runs off of, or the CD Drive itself. He says this because he still runs Medal Of Honor: Pacific Assault without any problems at all, on a DVD.

As for me, I think my hard drive is seriously screwed, and I need help.

[Edited on 12/21/2004 by Mega X.exe]

Don\'t sweat.
Keep cool.
I\'ve had to see and shake my head at many CPU errors. Don\'t try anything rash (or try not to) until you\'ve pretty much cornered the problem. Search, then destroy.
I\'m by no means not a CPU expert. I\'ve never even used an IM before. <yeah, I\'m hopeless, I know.:lol:> but what I do know is what NOT to do.
I repeat, no sweat, keep cuu...

Uhhh..from all those resets you probably have some bad sectors on your drive. I dunno though..you\'re probably running WinXP? I don\'t know if XP has Scandisk or something like it..but you need to do a thorough test where Scandisk takes an hour or so looking at the harddrives surface.

At least stop playing that damn game for awhile. Does the game need a patch or anything?

Yeah, I\'m kind of thinking it\'s a bad sector. XP\'s got ScanDisk. Albeit differently named. Now would be a good time to use it...

As for not playing it... It\'s an addiction. To some, it\'s Rockman, to others D&D. Well, one could say, if stretched...

Myst is my porn. Er...without all the nsaty stuff.

It\'s actually rather lucky that this happened now. We had another problem recently, and I was forced to format the entire hard drive. So...everything worth saving has already been saved. We haven\'t put anything really that important on this one. Thanks for the help.

If it would help any, I can try and type up the error message for reference. It would be rather simple using another computer to do the typing, as it doesn\'t fade until after F2 is pressed.

As for the game, I\'ve played it on this computer countless times before with no problem. The fact that it doesn\'t work now shows more of a problem with the computer than anything.

Truly sorry for double posting. However, here is the error.


USB Device(s): 4 Storage Devices
Auto-Detecting Pri Master..IDE Hard Disk
Auto-Detecting Sec Master..ATAPI CD-ROM
Auto-Detecting Sec Slave..ATAPI CD-ROM
Pri Master: 15.05R15 WDC WD1200AB-22DYAO
Ultra DMA Mode-5, S.M.A.R.T. Capcable and Status BAD
Sec Master: HD08 IDE-DVD ROM 16x
Ultra DMA Mode-2
Sec Slave: PPB1 LITE-ON LTR-48247S
Ultra DMA Mode-2
Auto-detecting USB Mass Storage Devices..
Device #01:
Device #02:
Device #03:
Device #04:
04 USB mass storage devices found and configured.

Pri Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace
Press <F1> for Setup , <F2> to Continue.

Post redacted

.....How much exactly did Mom pay for our 146gig.....???:eek::eek::eek:

Now, don\'t jump to conclusions. I see someones saying \"it\'s the hard drive\" and someone else is all \"it\'s the disk\" and someone else... \"it\'s the drive\".
Once again, keep cool, don\'t jump to conclusions; SEARCH, then destroy.

[Edited on 12/21/04 by Variable]

It\'s not a laptop right.

Ugh... I have had such bad experiences with IDE drives myself too. I had the following with my long dead and disassembled 40GB IBM Deskstar (So you know which drives you should NOT buy):

First I was defragging the drive and halfway the drive didn\'t respond at all and the system crashed. So I reset that thing and found out the drive could not be read at all. The BIOS couldn\'t find the drive either. So I messed around with the patchcables until the drive can be seen again. And everything seems okay.

Second, after having a hard time of installing the pc version of MMX5, playing it, shutting down and booting it next day, I got an error message about the harddrive index consistency. Because the drive has a volume for the OS (C) and another for the games (D) only D was affected. After XP messed around with the indexes, it appeared that the MAJORITY OF MY DATA WAS DELETED!!! So I had to try recovering all (seemingly) lost data with some recovery program. I bought a 200GB Maxtor Diamond 9 hard drive, for another computer which is on 24/7 for filesharing purposes, so I could do so.

Third, when I was playing Doom 3, my HD crashed again. Trying to scan around, several noises were coming from. The affected volume (D again) could not be accessed at all and I was only able to access C when I booted from a Win98 startup disk. So only the data on C could be recovered. Being fed up of the broken disk, I bought TWO 120 GB Western Digital SATA (My mobo has two of those connectors) harddisks which I configured in RAID 1 (so one drive would hold the exact copy of the other). Of course I had to reinstall everything again. Now I\'m pretty sure I won\'t encounter these all again.


I hope my experience with dem drives could help you further...