Monday, November 12, 2012

Disaster Averted!

Okay okay, I confess I haven't been around of late, or even building come to that.  That nasty thing called real life is still demanding lots of my attention, particularly on the job seeking front, and I had a major disaster... two in fact, with regard my computer.  I suffered a particularly nasty virus attack that locked the PC and disabled safe boot mode.  The first time it struck took me a couple of days to sort out.  The second time merely a couple of hours since I'd remembered how I got round it.  You can't be too cautious people.  I actually have a good virus checker that deals with files in real time, yet it missed this one twice.

Having thought the worst was over, I was horrified to discover that it had somehow messed with two of my games, being Neverwinter Nights and World of Tanks, somehow assigning them to the creation of further viral attacks and rendering the programs unusable.  Fortunately the virus checker caught the files they kept creating whenever I tried to run them, but I was unable to fix the problem and make the programs run.  This was quite a disheartening moment for me.  World of Tanks I could manage without, but the loss of Neverwinter meant that work was unnaccesable, and that I'd never be able to witness my son enjoy my creations.

Fortunately I'm a patient fellow, and I decided to persevere and tackle the problem.  Several days later, having uninstalled both programs then re-installed them (a somewhat painful task with NWN since it meant having to remember how I got it to run on my system in the first place, plus having to find the critical rebuild patch that Bioware no longer have available), I was relieved to find I'd fixed the problem, and especially pleased that I'd made backups of essential files.

So... fingers crossed, I'm now back in business, and quite excited about building again having overcome the initial sense of loss.

Right now I need a rest though ;)

6 comments:

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi Geoff,

Having to "rebuild" a computer at any level can be a pain in the neck ... and a good reason why to keep backups of work done to date.

Also, although a virus (or any data damaging event) can lose data, always remember that you can get a computer back up and running again as long as you have the original software, so don't ever worry that you will not be able to see something again (as long as you have backep up the data at least).

What was the virus? Bear in mind that a data problem can just be a sign of a hardware issue on its way and an anti-virus can show a false positive making you think it was a virus.

Also, I have every NWN "patch" file there was on a CD somewhere, so if there was ever any data you need on that front, I should have it. :)

Anyway, you really do need to come over to NWN2 where you can help with some of your fantastic work "over here".

All the best!

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sorry i not know english

i want only know if you continue your mod...

Quillmaster said...

Yes, I do continue with it, although at a slow pace.

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Anonymous said...

Hi, I am on chapter one, how do I get to the sewer grate?

Quillmaster said...

To get to the sewer grating you have to go back to the tavern and look for the cellar.