Crash: corrupt archive?

#1 - Sept. 5, 2012, 6:01 p.m.

I installed Guild Wars 2 during the head start and it played fine for the first two days. Now it crashes every time I launch it. I can load an area, move for about 10 seconds, and then the game’s gone and I have an error telling me a file in the archive is corrupt and I need to run repair. I have repaired numerous times, uninstalled and reinstalled, but I cannot still get back to that happy point where the game worked. All background apps have been disabled, video card drivers have been unintalled and reinstalled to latest version, install location has been moved from Program Files (x86) to its own folder, dat file has been deleted and redownloaded, peripherals have been unplugged… what else can I do? I assume the game made some registry changes that aren’t being undone by the uninstall, because no other changes have been made to this system. Ran ccleaner, but that offered no fix either. The computer is only a month old, has very little software on it, and runs every other game I’ve thrown at it without error. No clue why is is so crashy. Can someone please advise? I submitted a trouble ticket 5 days ago, but no word back yet.

BillFreist

#8 - Sept. 6, 2012, 4:02 p.m.

Yes this is because of a hardware failure (or failing). The files that your computer are writing to the disk don’t match up with what they are supposed to be, which is why the game crashes.

Your memtest results pretty much nailed the issue, which sucks because you have bad hardware . Hope you get this resolved and back in-game!

-Bill

PaulMarden

#12 - Sept. 6, 2012, 5:21 p.m.

Hello, Jaxxeh —

Unfortunately, the game is not able to diagnose memory-issues itself. The reason this manifests as “a file was corrupted in the archive” is because the game’s downloader uses that bad memory to process the files from the file-server before writing them to disk. This means that when the game tries to load one of those files when you’re actually playing, it’ll end up loading a corrupted file and will crash in the manner experienced here.

The repair process checks every single file in the 14+ GB archive and removes the bad ones it finds. Then it redownloads those removed files, which is another opportunity for bad memory to corrupt them all over again. = (

To be honest, even if it didn’t crash here, the bad memory could strike in many, many different ways — some subtle and others far from subtle. If you’ve got evidence of bad memory, I suggest contacting your manufacturer ASAP.

EDIT: I should note that the downloader does verify everything it receives from the file-server before writing it to disk. Alas, that process is not immune to hardware-errors like bad memory.