Has this happened to anyone else?

[Fibber]

Hi;
I have been working on a ETO install and it was starting to run well. Suddenly it got erratic and then wouldn't start at all! Keep getting the" .. failed to initialize need to reinstall...... "message. Disgusted, I started all over again step by step with Ramis' excellent tutorial. Still kept getting the messsage of "failed to initialize......". As a break I went to fly Tango Romeos' Korea which worked up till early Sunday morning and now IT won't work. Went to my PTO install and now IT won't work. All the .dat files from INFO are GONE and ALL of my aircraft in all theaters are missing their .cfg files!
Hate to have to rebuild over five years worth of add-on's:banghead:
Somehow I feel something nefarious is afoot and I am PISSED!
Ran all sorts of AV and spyware checks with Neg.Results. Oh, and I almost forgot on one start my "scenery" file was gone from the main cfs2!
Anyone else getting this?

[Tango_Romeo]

Hi;
I have been working on a ETO install and it was starting to run well. Suddenly it got erratic and then wouldn't start at all! Keep getting the" .. failed to initialize need to reinstall...... "message. Disgusted, I started all over again step by step with Ramis' excellent tutorial. Still kept getting the messsage of "failed to initialize......". As a break I went to fly Tango Romeos' Korea which worked up till early Sunday morning and now IT won't work. Went to my PTO install and now IT won't work. All the .dat files from INFO are GONE and ALL of my aircraft in all theaters are missing their .cfg files!
Hate to have to rebuild over five years worth of add-on's:banghead:
Somehow I feel something nefarious is afoot and I am PISSED!
Ran all sorts of AV and spyware checks with Neg.Results. Oh, and I almost forgot on one start my "scenery" file was gone from the main cfs2!
Anyone else getting this?

You've got...either a corrupt aircraft in your Aircraft folder, or a corrupt ship in the Ships folder. Either can cause the problem. Remove recently added aircraft and ship folders one at a time and test CFS2 after each removal. :wavey:

.....and by corrupt I mean the folder may just be missing a needed file or subfolder. :kilroy:

[Fibber]

T.R.
Thanks for the message. I thought that but I had not added anything into your theater since you put out your last update. My PTO hasn't been touched for awhile also. Leave well enough alone!!!! My recent problem with the ETO was a stock install with no additional ships or planes. I did add in the files recommended for Achims airfields. They were all object_dps and Scenerydb add-ons and I think one of them may be bad.
Now to start all freaking over again!:banghead:

[miamieagle]

Next time have a backup install if possible on a externa Hard drive.As you upgrade your new CFS2 theater install and you are satisfy that is working properly you upgrade your backup install. This way if something goes wrong you can always go back to your backup install and copy and past the into the new theater install that got corrupted.

Some times you will need to delete the whole new install from inside its folder and copy the content of your backup into its folder to get it running again.Do not ever erase the new install folder! Just its content within it. The folder its what CFS2 recognize for it to wotk properly.

I hope I have been helpful.:wavey:

[bearcat241]

I once had this happen to me many years ago in my early XP years. I did a reinstall of XP after a viral setback and the reinstall automatically wiped out all cfg's, ini's and dat's on the C:\ drive - no matter where located. Back then it was my routine to install everything possible on the C:\ drive.

It begin to dawn on me that it was a poor idea to maintain my precious sims on the same drive as my OS because the background OS management and your self-installed security programs can do many things without your knowing or control. And not to mention the all-too-common fact that an infection or trojan can also fowl up anything at random on the system drive and require a full format or system rollback to fix. Any of these things can have dreadful consequences on your resident sims and games. Same goes for your download archives.

Either repartition your C drive into three separate sections and move all valuable programs to one new partition via reinstall and the downloads to another; or get a new internal hard drive and move everything there. OS monitoring components, security programs, trojans, viruses, and malware mainly focus on the system C:\ drive.

By default, security programs will attempt to venture beyond the system drive and cross into other partitions and drives to do their work, but at this point they are completely manageable and customizable - you can turn off this multi-drive monitoring feature. Once you take these steps, things become greatly secured and about the only setback that can hurt the sims and games from this point is a drive failure down the road.

By the way, one more tip: if you adopt this multi-drive or multi-partition idea, be sure to turn off monitoring for all extra drives and partitions in the System Restore Tool - only keep it on the C drive. This way, if your system is on the C drive and your games on the D drive and you get hit with any problem that requires a system restore rollback to say, four days ago, and you just installed new scenery and weaps in your sim on D drive today, the sim won't be affected by the C drive rollback and you can keep your most recent add-ons.

[Tango_Romeo]

I did add in the files recommended for Achims airfields. They were all object_dps and Scenerydb add-ons and I think one of them may be bad.:banghead:

...it's for sure that the culprit is a recently installed file. Hope you find it, and don't have to 'toss the baby with the bathwater'. :d

[oldwheat]

If you have run a registry fix program lately, it may have deleted any folder that was empty (Didn't have a 'dummy' test file in it).