Technical help needed

[LouB]

I know I should have posted this in the sticky, but I need help now.

Last evening I was getting set to run the Ancient's way Terror Zone for a second time. When I clicked on the waypoint the laptop crashed, the screen went black and I had zero response from my laptop. So, I closed the lid and waited till the fan speed had stopped. On opening the lid I was able to log back in. This was the second time that has happened though I wasn't playing D2R the first time.

I then logged onto Battlenet and started D2R. The game started up as if I hadn't played before with the questions like on color blindness and then started the opening the very first story graphics. I skipped over that and got to my offline characters only to find that the character that I had been playing, my wolfbarb, was not listed. I think trried a number of my other characters and the game started to load, but then gave me a Failure to join game message. The game would allow me to start an online character. I've shut down the computer and retried several times with the same error.

I then tried GoMule and while it shows my wolfbarb, when it opens it says disconnected and is totally empty. I've checked the save games folder and all of the charaters are still there. I've checked and I have the latest drivers on the laptop.

This reminds me of when I tried playing D2R on my old desktop before I realized that my video card was capable of handling the game. The game would shut down and the only way to play again was to uninstall and reinstall. It took me three times to realize I had an issue with the desktop.

I believe that somehow the crash corrupted the offline game files and at this point I need to uninstall the game and reinstall it. Obviously, I need to copy and save the files in the Save Game folder to another folder.

Any thoughts on what else to try?

 

[DarkMaster]

D2R has an issue where if you suffer a hard computer shutdown (holding the power button, blackout, crash, etc.) while you're ingame with a character then that character and the shared stash become corrupted and either need replaced with a backup or deleted. I'm not sure if anything gets corrupted if you crash in the main menu but it would seem plausible. Probably something to do with the game memory and RAM or something, not sure on the technical details. Hopefully you had some backups, otherwise they're gone.

 

[NorthDakota]

I've got some bad news for you Lou

Because d2r holds characters in memory, when the game crashes unexpectedly (like a power outage or hardware crash), it can lead to corrupted data which is unrecoverable. You can try reinstalling but I doubt that it'll make any difference as the problem is with the character files themselves.

There's really only one option you have. If you're muling using gomule, it should be creating backups of your characters automatically. You can restore those by deleting the date information from the filename, and obviously the .org extension on the end of the file name, and then placing that renamed character file into your saved games folder.

The only solution I have to prevent this from happening is literally backing up your entire save folder every so often. I do it about every 3 days as I did lose a character to this and learned my lesson pretty hard.

Fairly interesting that your settings all reset as well. There's a settings file called Settings.json which is located alongside your save files at C:\Users\%username%\Saved Games\Diablo II Resurrected - it's unexpected that that file was corrupted as well.

Edit: When I lost my guy, it only erased one guy. I'm not sure why that is. I believe I was interested in seeing what exactly had changed with the file, so I looked with a hex editor and it was zeros across the board (completely erased, no information whatsoever). You could double check that way as well, but I don't remember how to do it now.

 

[LouB]

Thank both of you for responding. I decided not to reihstall the game and to just cut all of the files in the saved game Resurected folder and paste them in another folder. I then renamed the saved GoMule character that got corrupted and moved it into the save game folder. Then I fired up D2R and ARGH is back!!! It looks like he actually only lost just a day worth of game play.

Out of curisosity l then just copied back into the saved game folder one of the other characters that I was unable to get logged into a game and had no problem with getting the game loaded. So it looks like all I need to do now is just copy and paste the character files that I want back into the saved folder. I also need to take the share file copy from the GoMule folder.

@NorthDakota I'm not sure that the .JSON file was corrupted, but once I removed it I was able to load games. AND yes you have a convert to saving my own characters. Will probably put them on a portable drive infact.

 

[PhineasB]

Really glad you were able to recover ARGH @LouB! I definitely adopted the weekly save to Thumbdrive mantra when I was running my 99ers and think it’s way worth doing rather than relying on Go Mule backups (in case you haven’t muled a character in a while).

 

[LouB]

Thank you Silopen

For those that are interested what happens when you convert one of the GoMule backups.
1. Obviously, the character goes back to whatever experience and equipment that was in the backpack and chest at the time the backup was made. So, besides the experience you could lose equipment.
2. I'm not sure when GoMule makes backups, but it does not occur when you mule items off your character. This means that you could have items now showing in your backpack and chest that have been muled off and are sitting in stashes. You need to be careful that you don't create duplicates in your stashes.
3. The backup file does not contain your game settings. You will have to manually set them. This includes player settings, quick cast and anything else that isn't a default game setting.
4. You will keep your map seed, but when you visit an area for the first time it will look like you've never been there before and you will have to explore the whole area to recreate the map.