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File Corruption problems, possible cause
I fought with Civ3 for nearly a month. I was constantly having problems with games crashing at a certain point, normally toward the later periods, when all the lands had been filled, etc. The game would not be able to continue past a certain turn, no matter what I did. I would reinstall it, try again, all to no avail.
At the same time, I was having problems with registry corruption in XP. I had to reinstall it 4 times in less than 3 weeks. Between XP and Civ3, I was definitely losing some patience.
But I finally found out that it was a hardware corruption issue. There are some serious problems with the nVidia video card I am using and the RAID controller card imbedded on my Gigabyte mobo (5 week old system). It causes corruption of files on RAID drives, seemingly when the video card is being heavily taxed.
I have now been playing Civ3 for a week now with ZERO problems, having moved all XP and gaming files off of my RAID setup onto a normal IDE drive. It is obvious that this was the issue all along.
Below is a link describing the problem with my mobo. Others in this forum experiencing similar problems with Civ3 may want to look around for issues in your system hardware. It took me a month to figure this out, so hopefully it can help others.
Lee
Paul's Gigabyte GA-7DXR FAQ
At the same time, I was having problems with registry corruption in XP. I had to reinstall it 4 times in less than 3 weeks. Between XP and Civ3, I was definitely losing some patience.
But I finally found out that it was a hardware corruption issue. There are some serious problems with the nVidia video card I am using and the RAID controller card imbedded on my Gigabyte mobo (5 week old system). It causes corruption of files on RAID drives, seemingly when the video card is being heavily taxed.
I have now been playing Civ3 for a week now with ZERO problems, having moved all XP and gaming files off of my RAID setup onto a normal IDE drive. It is obvious that this was the issue all along.
Below is a link describing the problem with my mobo. Others in this forum experiencing similar problems with Civ3 may want to look around for issues in your system hardware. It took me a month to figure this out, so hopefully it can help others.
Lee
Paul's Gigabyte GA-7DXR FAQ