Ruined Hard Drive's possibly linked to WA install

[Weasel Boy]

I will restrain myself from telling the community how F'ing annoyed I am at this moment in time otherwise I run the risk of being punished lol.

Having installed WA roughly 5 months ago, my machine grounded to a halt and crashed after a few hours of play. Upon reboot it became apparent that the hard drive had been destroyed. The read/write pin had been somehow knocked out of its alignment and had scratched the disk surface. Not best pleased I replaced the hard drive a few weeks later. However it was not until yesterday I reinstalled WA again. No prizes for guessing what happend? So now I have just returned from my local computer retailer having spent another £35 on a hard drive.

Has this happend to anyone else before and if so, why does this keep happening, as the result is proving rather costly?

[The Prophet]

Something like this happened to me, not as bad as yours, but still annoying.

After a few months of having WA installed it deleted all the files in the Dawn of War Folder.I still had the folders, but there was nothing in them. No idea why it effected the hard drive though :wtf2:

[Adonis]

Moving to Tech Assistance forum.

[Dawnofdarken]

just a question, but do you over clock your hardware?

[Weasel Boy]

No nothing is over clocked, my system spec is:


AMD Athlon Xp 2600+
2.08GHz
512MB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 440
Both times using a Western Digital hard drive, a 40Gb and a 80 GB

[athmos]

Overclocking doesn't have anything to do with hard drive, it only concerns CPU, GPU and RAM. I can't see how that would affect HD, neither do i understand how WA could physically crash your disk... The only thing driving the read/write head is the disk own firmware, not even the OS.

I would think it is a coincidence... Disk crash are bound to happen, you probably just had very, very bad luck. I feel sorry for you, but i don't even know of Viruses that can crash a disk...

Maybe possibly if for any reason you had an old/fragile disk and because of a software problem your machine crashed hard during install, like in the instant power down sort of crash, your disk might have stopped and the pin crashed onto it, thus damaging your HD physically.
That's the only thing i can think of about how a software could damage a HD...
But i had quite some Haaaard crash (electricity failure, hard shock on the computer case, plugged pulled by someone and even once a leak in a water cooling that caused the MOBO to die (at least the AGP port). And i never, ever had a disk crash because of that, but theorically at least, it's possible...
Almost every disk crash i had (i had a few, maybe 3 or 4) happened to disks i used to transport a lot (rack or external HD), and one falled from a chair on the tiled floor...

Anyway, good luck with your future experience and my sincere condoleance for your por hard drives, but i can't see how the game install could be directly responsible for a disk physical crash.

Athmos

[Ifitmovesnukeit]

Oh great, now you've made me paranoid... my HD got fried as well a number of months after installing WA... although my new HD has been fine for 9 months now...

[Weasel Boy]

Yeah, thanks for the information, I think you might be right with the bad luck idea. However twice bitten third time shy lol.

[TBS]

As you are the first person to mention this I think its safe to assume that WA doesnt fry HDDs. Anyway, as the harddrive you just replaced was only 5 months old you should have been able to get it replaced for free under warranty.

[Weasel Boy]

Yeah I know about the warranty, currently I am unable to look into the matter ,and require my computer for work purposes so I needed to replace the hard drive as soon as possible. Thanks for all the info, i'll be installing WA later, rest assured if it happens again my rants will be submitted lol.

[Moe]

WA has been sold literally hundreds of thousands of times. It's safe to assume that if it did indeed physically crash hard drives more than just one person would have mentioned this.

[kornuletz]

i had a somewhat similar problem:

At some point my DoW folder became unreadable by the OS...
After some experimenting i managed to make the folder be readable but it was not writable (i couldn't copy replays or anything else in it).
Annoyed i just cut-pasted all files and subfolders to another folder that i renamed after i deleted the original empty folder...

I have never had that problem with any other folder or software.

Weird....