An interesting tale in COF troubleshooting... (Long)

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Quick Background--I added an 80 Gig HD to my system. As part of the setup, I prepared the new HD as my boot drive, as the old one I'm prepping for XP on a new box I'll be building. During the six hour process, a copy error appeared on one of the files. I noted it was a bgl, but the error flashed so quickly that I put the thought of it in the dark recesses of my mind....After I made the new drive my master and booted from it, I launched COF.... No problems... Afterwards, I decided to backup COF to my second partition.... Nice having enough space finally to make such backups :) Launched COF (from its original location) afterwards, and was greeted by a "rebuilding indexes" followed by an out of memory error. Subsequent launches of COF created an instant out of memory error and CTD...I'm posting this so I can explain how I solved the issue, and what caused it. Starting with what caused it, the bgl that didn't copy when I prepped the new drive did copy, at least partially. Basically, what was left was correct in name, but corrupt in substance. Attempting to copy the bgl triggered something that made COF sense a "change".When COF senses a change in a bgl, it rebuilds the index where the scenery resides. This is an important clue in troubleshooting an issue when COF suddenly won't start. Since I knew the index rebuild preceded the COF CTD, I did a "find" and looked for the most recently updated index. I saw that the index being rebuilt was in the NAME folder. I located the folder on the COF CD, and extracted the bgls from it back to the NAMEscenery folder. Restarted COF, index rebuild, and.....success....There are many times when we pull our hair out, and reload COF (or FS2002) from scratch. Knowing what was going on and locating the folder where the problem was took a potentially hours long process, and turned it into something like fifteen minutes, including the time to troubleshoot. It also highlights an important issue--sometimes, COF failures are caused by corrupt files. In my case it was quite likely that a surge or some other random event caused a serious error when that file was copied to the new HD. Considering that was the only failure among the tens of thousands of files copied during my HD conversion, I consider this a learning experience and a chance to share what I learned with our community...Regards,John