Hi All,

I was curious if anyone has had hard-drive related incidents around the time they've been playing The Witcher or The Witcher 2.

Full disclosure - I just lost my second hard drive tonight. I was fighting the Kayran, and my system locked up. Left it on for over 10 minutes just looping the music and being stuck (couldn't ctrl-alt-del or anything else, though num lock still worked on the keyboard), and finally I hard rebooted my system.

The system failed to POST, hard disk failure, and subsequent reboots led to a sometimes appearing, sometimes completely gone hard disk.


If this was the first time it'd happened I'd think it was a fluke, and that's why I'm posting it here, to find out if anyone else has had a hard disk fail while playing TW1 or 2.

I had a similar stall and force reboot on my last hard disk while playing TW2, and while that one would sometimes boot into windows, it would stall if I browsed to the witcher savegame folder, and often the HDD would fail to be recognized at all when I powered up my machine.

So, consider this a research project - anyone else have "suspicious" hard disk failures?

Does this happen with other games as well... If yes, then the hard drive is faulty.
And are you sure it's not too warm?

I don't think TW has nothing to do with your HDD failing. If it's the second one already, it's either bad luck, or maybe the problem lies elsewhere.

The last time I had looping music in a game that hardlocked the entire system, was when my PSU was dieing.

Windows OS uses something called HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) which means software is not capable of addressing hardware directly (especially hardware such as internal hard disk drives). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer

This does mean that The Witcher 2 cannot address the drive directly without going through Windows. It is possible that the game has problems talking to your installation of Windows or it's drivers (let the blame game begin). That being said it is the first time I have heard of this kind of issue with The Witcher games.

Actually... I've recently had hard disk issues after playing through the witcher 2. Thought it was just a factor of time or some internal error to do with Raid 0, and wiping both HDs before switching to no Raid and reinstalling windows has gotten my computer working again...

The Point: Maybe there's something to your idea.

The setup was:
winxp
nvidia gtx 260
4gb ram
2x seagate somethingortheother

Actually, your problem was almost certainly with the RAID support.

Consumer motherboard RAID is crap and should not be used, ever. If you want to use RAID, get a proper add-on RAID controller (yes, they are expensive; only the expensive ones actually work) and RAID-supporting disks like Western Digital RE3's.

The Witcher 2 does not break disks. Disks that are prone to break will break with The Witcher 2, just because they would break with anything that uses the disks heavily.

Fairly valid observation...

Most desktop level drives are NOT RAID compliant. Basically they have inspection modes that can freeze drive operations for up to 2 minutes as they analyse a drive issue, unfortunately most RAID arrays only tolerate up to 15 seconds break.

So if you want to play RAID, always read the fine line...

Here is an example link:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397

Frankly, I'm wondering if Win 7 breaks disks. I've only been on Win 7 about 5 months now, and I've noticed the HDD LED never shuts up. It may only be a half dozen disk accesses per second with the system idle, but those add up.

My last system ran XP and went 8 yrs with no disk problems. I'm not sure about the level of HDD activity on that system, as the LED didn't work and I never thought to check activity; but I had the system on pretty much 24/7 all that time. Now I find myself turning the system off when I won't be using it, which causes me some cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, I tried researching the issue, but didn't find much. Time will tell, I guess.

New operating systems (past Vista) as well as servers maintain constant contact with HDD as part of the awareness and diagnostics routines, while this can be disabled via group policy it is enabled by default.

What I would suggest is for you to look for the case that has a proper implementation of HDD LED. Cases I personally use no longer have LEDs as I see no point in seeing it constantly flash at me.

There is a really decent software available at www.binaryfortress.com that will add a Sys Tray icon to represent your HDD activity so the LED for that can go.

I disagree with your assessment that consumer level RAID is crap. Most "consumer" level RAID works just fine. The issue that comes along with consumer level RAID is that companies or users with self-builds use very cheap hard drives and wonder why they fail so often. Get high end drives with high MTBFs (mean time between failure) ratings. Don't cheap out on your hard drives with any level RAID. WD VelociRaptor series, higher end SSD, etc.

I do agree that this person is running into failures while using high disk use apps like TW2 and needs to invest in higher end drives. If money is not an issue you could always put enterprise class equipment in your desktop like a good Adaptec SAS controller with 10k or 15k rpm drives and you would have a VERY hard time "breaking" those down since they are designed to handle huge amounts of traffic, but in the end buy a better drive than a 5,400 rpm Newegg special if you know what I mean.

I had WD RE2 750 GB disk. RE is from "RAID Edition". I've lost it during playing TW2 (game freezes and hard reset was required; many times). Was it TW2 or Win7 Ultimate 32-bit? I don't know...

... but "funny" thing is that my system drive was and is OCZ Vertex Turbo 120 GB. TW2 was and is installed on this SSD. Then why HDD was damaged? I don't know...

...but I think problem is with Win7 when HDD is connected as additional drive (e.g. for user's profile)... and with power management maybe. At first I tried to "disable" power management for all disks but whatever I was able set Win7 didn't care and I heard how it works when I'm trying to access HDD after longer time.

Why am I suspicious about PM in Win7? Well, old WinXP SP3 with the same HDD (dual boot PC) worked just fine and never tried to do some "lousy power saving". I've got two additional WD RE4 2 TB in NAS Synology DS-211+ set in RAID 1 and they're working perfect.

TW2 makes problems with freezing but Win7 makes even bigger problems with PM of HDDs.

Solution? Well. Maybe after every hard reset users should boot in safe mode because first "normal" start will not find HDD (like in my PC with Win7).

BTW Maybe "Fallout: New Vegas" made it too. There were more hard resets then for TW2... but I played TW2 two months after F:NV.

At first I had dual boot PC: old WinXP on HDD and new Win7 on SSD (entire system with profiles; just for testing/practicing/learning). I had small partition on HDD as "temp" shared by both systems.

When old HDD died I've installed Win7 only and I've set new bigger HDD e.g. for profiles. I didn't noticed big differences between reading/writing saves on SSD and HDD. Right now I'm not playing long then 30-40 minutes (after that time I'm restarting TW2). Oh, well. Such freezing was before 2.0 patch but I'm still afraid of this...

Not sure why people relay on RAID to begin with...
If you need speed get SSD, if you need reliability get Raptor...
If you need storage, get NAS...
And remember none of the options above are classified as "backup"

The LED wasn't the problem. The incessant disk accesses were the problem. But now I have FINALLY solved that, like I should have 6 months ago. I installed RAID drivers when I built my system, but the anticipated RAID setup never happened. I didn't think to uninstall the drivers, but I should have. I believe the culprit was the Intel Rapid Storage Technology, though I also uninstalled the Marvell SATA Controller Driver and the Marvell Storage Utility. Now the HDD LED is quiet when the system is idle. I'm happy -- maybe 93 million disk accesses wasted, but better late than never!