It seems that if you exit FSX with anything but a "normal"exit, there is a very good possibility that the logbook willbecome corrupted.When this occurs, the next time you start FSX it will just hangthe splash screen. You'll need to kill the fsx.exe process toclear it.In order to get FSX to run again you must delete the logboog.BIN file and if you've not backed it up, there goes all your flight timerecords!I've just had this occur after ending a flight. I was at the aircraft selection screen and clicked on "Pilot Records". At thatpoint FSX went into never-never land and I had to abort it withthe Windows Task manager.Looking at the logbook.BIN with a HEX editor, it appears to beOK, at least the basic structure. The first byte of a record is"05H" and the next byte is the record length. Adding that byte tothe address of the "05H" byte will give you the address of thebeginning of the next record, i.e. the next "05H" byte.After deleting ( renaming ) my "corrupted" file I restartedFSX and it came up normally. A new logbook.BIN was created.I verified the structure of the new file against my originalfile to insure that I was interpreting the file correctly.There is no overall checksum, unless FSX is keeping thatinformation somewhere else, so I don't know why it is seeingthe original logbook.BIN as corrupt.The new logbook format, a BIN file, as opposed to the FS9logbook format, a text file, seems to be the wrong way to go.At least in FS9 the only corruption was the entry in the CFGfile and all you needed to do to fix that was go in and re-enterthe correct name for the logbook file.I'm going to continue to investigate this problem if for noother reason than to get my "hours" back. Just one more GLITCHin what I percieve to be a long, LONG road of FSX glitches... :( Paul

UPDATE to my message above:I managed to "rescue" all but the last two entries in my logbook.BINfile that somehow became corrupted.It was a bit tedious but I saved 20 entries.Using a HEX editor, I opened the file. Then I found the begining of the records, "05 xx 00 00""xx" is the record length and will vary. Perhaps the easieast way to find the beginning of a record is look at the text outputpanel. The record ENDS with the name of the aircraft if there isno added comment. Otherwise it ends after the comment text.The next byte will be "05".To isolate the problem I started about 1/3 of the way into the fileand found a start-of-record. I then deleted all the records fromthat point on. Saved the edited file as the new logbook.bin andthen clicked "UNDO" in the HEX editor to get the whole file back.I made a note of where I deleted from, for reference.Started FSX and found that I had a good logbook with 9 entries.Back in the HEX editor I skipped down 2 records from where I didthe previous delete. Repeated the above process. I kept this upuntil FSX hung again, then backed up 1 record at a time untilI had a good logbook.BIN again. I suppose the easier way might be to start at the end and workupwards but I had no idea where the corruption might have occured.So, a word to the wise...BACK UP your logbook.BIN file often! Paul========= Further update ==========I discovered what was corrupted in the logbook.BIN.It was the LENGTH byte of the 3rd record from the end.Actual length was "3f" but the entry was "6d".I corrected that byte in the original file and now have all my flight hours back. The last two records wereactually OK but that bad length byte in the 3rd from theend caused FSX to begin reading in the middle of the next record. Somehow this causes the whole program to HANG! Paul

Mine is messed up also.

Paul,You deserve a very BIG THANK YOU!I'm so glad you posted this message. I've been running FSX on Vista RC2 for a while and about 10 days ago I updated to the latest nVidia drivers for RC2. Around that exact same time FSX began to lock up at the splash screen. I figured it was the video driver update and haven been tearing apart Vista trying to rollback and update drivers. I even deleted the [user] config files for FSX and did an FSX install repair hoping that would fix the issue. Well none of it worked and after several hours of fiddling with Vista and FSX I gave up figuring that I needed a clean install Vista and video drivers (possibly this weekend). For some reason I never deleted the FSX files in the folder under My Documents. When I saw your post I got excited and quickly removed my Logbook.BIN file and started FSX. After a few anxious moments FSX was loaded and working. Again, thank you so much for this post you saved be a complete wipe of my machine because of one corrupted file.MS, I confirm this to be one nasty bug.-Thad

>Paul,>>You deserve a very BIG THANK YOU!>-SNIP->MS, I confirm this to be one nasty bug.>>-Thad Glad I could help, Thad. This is another "learning experience" for us all, it seems :) Paul

I want to thank you too. My FSX wouldn't open for over a week. I also spent over 4 hours on the phone with MS support. They were no help at all. Now everything's back to normal, I just have to fix my logbook and get my flights back.FLMach1

>I want to thank you too. My FSX wouldn't open for over a>week. I also spent over 4 hours on the phone with MS support.>They were no help at all. Now everything's back to normal, I>just have to fix my logbook and get my flights back.>>FLMach1 If you have a HEX editor and are compfortable digging around in the 0-F realm, start by checking the record length bytes for the last few logbook.BIN entries. Look for the begginging of record byte "05" and note it's address. The next byte is the record length. Add that to the address of the "05" byte. That result should point to the next "05" beginning of record byte or, in the case of the last file, the end of the file. If any of the record lengths, when added, get you to a different byte than "05" or beyond the end of the file, calculate the real length and change the length byte. That's how I repaired my corrupted file. here's what the first 24 bytes of a logbook entry look like and what the fields represent. Most records without comments are 63 bytes long. The one below is 71 bytes ( only the 1st 24 shown ) I inserted the "|" between fields...The formatting MAY get PORKED due to different fonts on your browser...05|47|00 00 3a f5 6e 74|d6 07|00|0a|19|0b 2e 27|45 45 54 4e|45 56 52 41|---|71|-----Unknown----|2006-|--|10|25|11 46 39|E E T N ----|E V R A ---len--------------------|year|----|mm|dd|hr-m-s-|DEP AIRPORT|ARR AIRPORT Paul

Using your method of where the logs start and end, I went to the last log in the logbook, which was suspect, and deleted it. That fixed the logbook. Then I copied the 3 flights that I had logged in my "new" logbook and pasted them in to the original logbook and I now have all my flights back except the suspect one. I don't care to remember that disaster anyway. I did lose all of my mission rewards but I think I lost them in the uninstall/reinstall process that I did 3 times. Thanks again, it's nice to have FSX back.FLMach1

fsxlogrecovery11.zip at avsim do the trick without needing of hex editing :)

>fsxlogrecovery11.zip at avsim do the trick without needing of>hex editing :)This is a VERY old thread...the logbook recovery utility didn'texist back when I started it....I now use logbookedit by LamontClark ( lc0277 ) to make changes to the FSX logbook.The ONLY edits I do from within FSX is to delete the very LASTfilght entered, usually a "test hop". Paul