Did Age of Empires 3 corrupt my HDD?

[frozentundra123456]

Hi all. Just a question and possible warning as well.

I have a relatively new computer that had been operating perfectly. I decided to play some Age of Empires 3 and the computer crashed to black screen but sound was still going. I had to turn the power off to get the computer to restart. Everything seemed to be working properly.

However, the next day I tried to start BL2, and it could not find the files. I decided to do a restart, and the computer would not boot. It tried repeatedly to to start-up repair, but was unsuccessful. I ultimately had to do a restore from the recovery partition to get the computer functional again. Seems to be working fine now though.

So could a crash and hard restart have caused this?

The comp is a 1 year old Dell XPS with an i5 and a HD7770 added in card.

 

[Elcs]

Possibly but wouldn't any game/programme that causes a crash and hard restart of a similar nature have the possibility of doing exactly the same?

Plus factor in that the drive might have been crapping out previously but causing no cues that we could pick on, I don't think you can blame AoE3 specifically unless it has happened in a significant other amount of computers to form a link.

It is likely worth checking SMART data and using a scan/repair programme to see what's up, making sure that you have an up to date backup of the machine's important data just in case

 

[frozentundra123456]

Possibly but wouldn't any game/programme that causes a crash and hard restart of a similar nature have the possibility of doing exactly the same?

Plus factor in that the drive might have been crapping out previously but causing no cues that we could pick on, I don't think you can blame AoE3 specifically unless it has happened in a significant other amount of computers to form a link.

It is likely worth checking SMART data and using a scan/repair programme to see what's up, making sure that you have an up to date backup of the machine's important data just in case

I was routinely monitoring the HDD with HDD health and it was 98% before the crash. I am now using the same hard drive after restoring the factory image, so I am hoping the HDD is not significantly damaged.

I am sure any crash could do it, but I am kicking myself, because when I started the game I got a warning message that there were known compatibility issues with it on Win 7, but I never thought a crash could cause a problem like this.

And of course, I had not done a back-up for a while, but at least I had backed up my photos to dropbox. All I really lost was some game saves for games that I was not playing much anymore.

 

[JamesV]

I doubt it.

I've had thousands of crashes over the years (since my 286SX 25MHz), including many local power failure shutdowns (until I started using UPS's), and I've never had anything like that happen.

More likely, something else was the culprit... too bad you can't see the windows logs from that time, since you restored.

The times my PC wouldn't boot, were almost all memory or motherboard related, except for waaaay back when you had to manually enter HDD parameters in BIOS.