Game crashes after victory screen

[Ardsgaine]

I'm having a problem with the game, and I wonder if anyone can help me. About 95% of the time, when the victory conditions for winning a conquest are met, I click through the victory screens and after closing the last one, the game crashes. This wouldn't be a huge problem, except I would like to keep playing sometimes, but the game is crashing before I get the "do you want to keep playing" window. I'm playing on Windows XP, and I have plenty of RAM. The game is installed on the E drive, and since installing it I've had a problem with the computer wanting to scan the E drive for errors and finding bad clusters, whatever those are. (I'm not real knowledgeable about the insides of a computer.)

I've installed both patches (Conquests and PTW), and that hasn't helped. I'm have the Civ3 Complete package, so maybe those patches don't work for it? Is there another patch that does? I didn't see one on the Civ3 website.

As an apparent side effect of this problem, the game doesn't record my score in the Hall of Fame either.

[buster]

Bad clusters are physical areas on the disk that are damaged. Lots of those are a sign that the disk is about to go belly up (with all the data on it).

The disk cannot read data that are located in a bad area. Say you installed civ on your drive and a couple of files cover an area of the disk that are bad - what will usually happen is that the computer will hang or bluescreen or give an error when ever it tries to access the disk.

It usually occurs due to manufacturing defects, shocks (like dropping the pc) or from the disk gettting too hot (badly ventilated cabinet).

The recommended solution is to replace the disk. If it is still under warranty you should be able to get it replaced free of charge as it is physically defect.

If there is no way you can get the disk replaced you can do as follows.

Go to start --> my computer.
right click drive E
choose tools
choose check now - mark both options - and click ok.
most likely there will come some message "cant do it as disk is in use, do you want to do it on next reboot" - choose yes.
On reboot there will come a message that the disk will now be checked.

It could take hours and when it goes over bad areas it will try to move the data out to good areas. Percentage can seem to stand still for a long time when this happens.

If it completes succesfully - windows will now have mapped the bad areas as "not to be used". As it only rarely manages to move all data out intact you will probably need to reinstall civ after to get fresh uncorrupt files in place.

If youre lucky it will work now, the bad areas are found and no longer will be used.

Note however:

once bad sectors start to come - more usually follow. Usually particles have come loose from the disk surface and are causing grinding to the surface and rollers.

It only takes one bad sector at the location of one to make that file unreadable. It only takes the pc trying to access that file one time to cause it to throw up some error.

Expect the disk to die any moment with no warning - and don't put anything on it of importance you don't have a backup of or can reinstall from CD. It likely wont be there for long.

Anyway - what you seem to have is simply a hardware defect. Had it been any other program that was the same place on the disk it instead would have been that one that was tilting.

[Ardsgaine]

Thanks for your advice. That helps a lot. The fan has been making a noise for off and on for some time, so I'm betting that that's led to poor ventillation and the disk getting too hot. So far, though, only the e drive has been affected, but as you say, it's probably down here from here.

[buster]

Normally it is - but sometimes it is just one specific are that got damaged and the damage does not spread further and the repair procedure fixes it. It is not the most common though.

Heat is a real problem on modern computers. Until you get the fan replaced running with the cabinet open can help.