OK so, well, yeah...

I fixed this old 4-6 year old Gateway 400VTX notebook after I received it, and it ran like a charm. No crashes, no lockups/hangs, no errors or anything related in the System's logs. And Windows records everything from a fart to a crash. So guess what happens next?

You guessed it. ChatZilla IRC Client was open, next thing you know I'm staring at a BSOD. So when I reboot I get multiple read/write errors from my disk and a few weeks later the OS won't boot the sectors are in such a bad shape. Right now I am using mom's computer btw.

The last time I played SC4 was... 1-2 weeks ago? Yes, I have tried opening the game a few times ever since this happened. The game barely executes, and locks up during loading the tiniest city.

So as the title implies, I have retired from Simcity for maybe a long time, or until I can replace my HDD.

Oh, that's sad.... I wish you good luck to finally find a computer that works for more than some weeks )(

You should definitely run a thorough drive scan for your hard drive.

blakesterville wrote:You should definitely run a thorough drive scan for your hard drive.

I have tried a wide range of options.

• Used SpinRite to relocate bad sectors
  
• Defrag, but when that happened I got a BSOD and the read write head started making odd grinding noises. o_O?
  
• Chkdsk, that wouldn't work any better
  
• Safe mode, notta
  

Then I ran SpinRite again to find 8 hrs later the HDD failed. O_O

It looks like you have a bad hard drive, then.

One thing on defrags: Don't defrag too often. You definitely want to run them once a month or so, but running them too often can cause wear on the hard drive.

blakesterville wrote:It looks like you have a bad hard drive, then.

One thing on defrags: Don't defrag too often. You definitely want to run them once a month or so, but running them too often can cause wear on the hard drive.

idk about that actually. With as little stuff is put on that HD daily, it always is fragmented. I might but copy and paste a few pics and save them in MS paint and every so often try out new software, and after testing, most of the time, I uninstall it.

So I tried Auslogics Disk Defrag and it was more thorough, not to mention faster and wouldn't be all stuck on stupid and give me a BSOD.

Well, your hard drive is probably always fragmented at least a little, even five minutes after a defrag. That's hard to avoid on a Windows system. However, it rarely significantly effects performance for a slight amount of fragmentation to exist on the on the hard drive. What does effect performance significantly is when the hard drive is highly fragmented.(Usually, starting at about 5% and being more noticeable at 10% fragmentation. )

The fragment rate I think was 8-9% when I started Auslogics Disk Defrag.

It lowered it to 0 which Windows would never do. Also, having in mind what happened that stopped the PC from booting, it would have been a life saver had I installed Ubuntu as a backup OS, which I sometimes hear warnings about doing that and never heed them. And now I wish I would have.

btw, what happened was Windows couldn't load up a corruped file, which had to be on a bad sector

It probably was a bad sector.

Installing Ubuntu on a bad hard drive probably wouldn't have done any good. (although I once installed Ubuntu on a hard drive with bad sectors. Ubuntu fixed those at startup, and I later found the number of relocated sectors to be eight. I don't know if it would work on a hard drive as badly corrupted as yours, unfortunately. I'm not sure, though. )

Bad sectors?

Probably one of the ten of them.

It only completely relocated it 1 of them.

hmmm.... hopefully Santa is on his way to your house with a new computer, or a solution
(If your Jewish then hopefully the same only without the santa part)

mayorm wrote:hmmm.... hopefully Santa is on his way to your house with a new computer, or a solution
(If your Jewish then hopefully the same only without the santa part)

I think we are all old enough not to believe in santa.

For me, Santa is a commercial figure. Nothing more.

Skimbo wrote:For me, Santa is a commercial figure. Nothing more.

Whatever I was just saying that because in the Terms of Service before registration it says that you must be 13 or older to register and what teen believes in santa?