Computer meltdown

it sounds like you got a virus before you ran the game cause the game is NOT the cause of your troubles
the reinstall of the os almost never fixes any problems and usually makes things worse

but I do have some questions....you say the floppy drive can't read any disk. do you mean floppies or the hard drives cause if the xp drive is formatted ntfs, a 98 boot disk is never gonna even see it let alone read it. it sounds like to me that you need to outright nuke the xp drive and get 98 running again to see if the hardware is ok

then reinstall xp and take the 9x drive out completely and see if the xp drive is ok then plug the 9x drive back in back it up and clear it out so you can set your dual boot back up




~SDC~

sorry bout the double post sdc is being "slow"
[Message Edited]

Thanks so much for responding. It is a frustrating problem.

The floppy drive (3.25 inch) won't read any disk, boot disk or not, until i boot off of my backup drive with win 98, then it can detect a floppy disk but tells me that the disk is blank and needs to be formatted, and it can format a disk. This is not good becasue my ether net card divers are on a floppy and i can't load them and get on the internet for help.

I can't boot off a CDROM either, it gives me an error message. However again, the CDROMs do work in win98 as they should.

The main hardrive is in ntfs. I am not sure what you mean by "nuke" the xp hardrive? format it , disconnect it or throw it away? I have disconnected it and reconnected it and nothing really changed. I don't see anyway of formating it as i can't get anything to recognize it. When i run win98, i can run programs off that drive without any problems, except that dern floppy drive problem.

It is a weird and disturbing problem. I also didn't think it was Galciv/stardock at first, and installed the game on my girlfriends computer with stardock to get updated patch, and guess what. Wheni stoppped playing she complained that now her internet explorer stopped working. It was the same thing all over again. That time however i uninstalled everything that i had installed--galciv, stardock, and direct x 9. I unistalled and reinstalled IE, no help, but when i installed winxp over itself it, it worked. Now IE works on her computer without any trouble.


well, i have win98 runing again, and some of the hardware (main harddrive and floppy drive) are not working as written above. I don't know if the motherboard is the problem, as it works with the old 98 drive. I don't really know what CMOS is, or how to fix that if it is the problem. I am not sure how to check all the hardware to see if it is OK. In the device manager it says everything is "working proplery," which is not true.



I can't reinstall xp, as it won't read any CDROM nor WINXP MSDOS boot floppy disk (or any floppy) during power up. My bios does detect the drives but something is not right. Somehow i need to get these to work.


Dirt Craver.

[Message Edited]

if you were able to dupe the problem using the same files on another puter that screams to me that you have a major virus infection

cause a virus can easily make the hardware act like that

what I meant by nuking the xp drive was do with a write protected CLEAN 98 startup disk a fdisk /mbr on the xp drive this will hopefully remove the bug if its there....

then you need to run fdisk again and choose option 3 to delete partition then 4 to remove the ntfs formatted partition

then you need someone to bring over a copy of any anti-virus app and scan all your disks for bugs cause you're spreading it to others

have ALL your drives scanned for bugs and your other puter as well

again stardock central and gal civ are not the cause of this

let me know the results of the virus scan then we'll go from there

~SDC~

Hi Brett

Hmmm the fact that you started to have Internet connecting problems might suggest a variant of the Blaster virus, although it could be several virus's working together at the end of the day, we suffer a great deal with all this where I work. Getting your PC virus scanned (and protected for the future) is a very good idea at this point, as I too believe that you've somehow gotten infected, and the fact that another PC is now doing the same sounds very VERY suspicious!

On a side note, I can't say I'm surprised that you're havaing problems if you've "upgraded" Operating Systems instead of formatting and re-installing from scratch, I know it's possible, but it's never the best way and can end up causing problems, especially with drivers and such

Keep us up to date and let us know what's happening, but I'd virus check, format and restart to be completely honest... just a suggestion though of course

Hello,

I did manage to get it working again, by doing the same the over and over agian until it just worked. What i mean is that, i put the win xp pro disk in the CDROM and it finally booted from, it took several tries as it stopped during various stages of the set up.

I did scan for virus afterward with norton antivirus 2004, after doing a live up date of the virus software, and everything was clean. I don't think it was a virus, as a virus was never detected upon startup prior to the meltdown.

The onlything that has been shared between my girl's computer and mine was the store bought Galciv CDROM. My email is scanned before i open it and i don't open email with attachment either.

I believe that some improtant files where corrupted by a software conflict. The OS had been upgraded from win 2k several years ago, and maybe over the years too many things got altered or something. So just to be sure, i have also reformatted the disk and installed winxp again.

For some reason the floppy drive doesn't read anymore, i think i will just try to replace it and see what happens. It is an old floppy drive that i had scavanged when i rebuilt my computer and maybe it wore out finally, i have no idea....