Gorgon wants to be re-installed?

[Mikhaila]

I was playing tonite at about 11:15 Eastern, and the game crashed. When i went to restart it would only let me re-install. It checked that I had the game files, seemed satisfied about two minutes, and let me log in. Anyone else had this happen? Just curious, seems to be working again.

[Citan]

That's probably a hardware problem, I'm sorry to say. I'd guess due to a bad disk sector. The OS can work around it by marking the sector as invalid, so you may be fine now... or the drive may be about to go kaput, so I'd back up anything critical on that drive. (This would be whichever drive you have Steam installing games to... which is your C drive by default.)

Steam handles the installation process, and the validation process too. When you can't do anything but install, it means Steam thinks your installation isn't complete. The game itself can't damage its installation -- which sounds crazy, but it's a safety feature: the game is installed in a read-only fashion. It can read its files, but not write them. So if they're damaged, and you didn't edit them, that means... something else damaged them. Usually a hardware failure. (Or a Steam bug, I mean, Steam has permission to edit those files, but it'd be a very weird Steam bug.)

[Mikhaila]

Thanks. That info may save me some grief, i'll start backing things up. The hardware is about 6 years old, so not inconceivable that the HD is going bad.