ESO wiped my HD

Alazais

So the game deleted itself and wiped out 95% of the hard drive it was installed on, I'm now having to go digging through deleted files to find whats left of my work files, personal photos and music. This is outrageous. This should stand as some kind of PSA for some of you, back up your files cause this could be a ticking time bomb for you too.

gimarwb17_ESO

OMG is this for real? Must be some kind of virus that sneaked into the game or something. Backing up now. Thanks for the message

Turelus

Might need a little more information on what you did and what happened.

I doubt the game just magically went and formatted your entire hard drive without something very odd happening. As for a virus sneaking into the game it's best not to start rumours without fact to base them on.

offycakes

I'll bet all the gold in Tamriel that you are the only one at fault for your files having been deleted.

Etchesketch

I tried to click play and a black hole opened up and swallowed my entire laptop!!

I Demand a free pony and a wind up monkey as recompense.

Knottypine

There's another explanation. But I guess it's pretty easy to put the blame that is totally unrelated to your problem... unless you were toying with addons from unreliable sources.

Supersomething

Sounds like a user error more than the software becoming sentient and deciding to troll you and mess with your computer.

daneyulebub17_ESO

You're digging through "deleted files", huh? As in the trash? So, a program actually put things in the recycled bin? Most uninstalls don't do that--they do a low-level delete. I kind of doubt this one would do that, either.

More likely, something you did triggered an underlying problem, or you accidentally deleted a folder you shouldn't have.

merk

if you guys want some dirt cheap and very reliable backup, use amazon glacier - costs you literally a penny per gb. I use that along with cloudberry backup as the backup client.

Alazais

I'm not the only one this happened to, go ahead and google it. I know a friend who also had this happen when installing ESO, it wiped his drive. To me it wasn't when I was installing it but I'm not sure what exactly caused it, I didn't play it in 2 days.

The last thing I installed was ESO, the last thing I downloaded was ESO (onto that drive). I don't have a virus, but believe whatever you want. I'm not asking for anything (including ponies). I'm just angry and posting it here because if this happens to anybody else, they need to know they aren't the only ones.

Including me and my friend this is 2 people who've had it cause this kind of problem, go ahead and google ESO wiping out hard drives, sure it seems remote but it is happening.

I had installed only a hand full of addons tested for months by the community and listed on various sites as "must have addons", FTC, Loot drop, Harvester map etc.

I've been using computers for decades and haven't had a virus in so many years I can't even remember, yeah I'm blaming ESO because it's the only thing that has changed recently and there are records of it doing it to others, but go ahead and say I don't know what I'm doing.

2 days ago I was playing the game just fine, I didn't even touch the drive it's on for the next 40 odd hours, read email, watched youtube only on my C drive. Go to open the game tonight and "Launcher.exe is not a valid win32 application", go to the install folder and it's empty, along with 95% of everything on the drive. I google a bit and discover that it's happened to other people, anybody wanna suggest how I'm wrong? go right ahead.

Alazais

daneyulebub17_ESO wrote: »

You're digging through "deleted files", huh? As in the trash? So, a program actually put things in the recycled bin? Most uninstalls don't do that--they do a low-level delete. I kind of doubt this one would do that, either.

More likely, something you did triggered an underlying problem, or you accidentally deleted a folder you shouldn't have.

No, i'm digging through files using recovery software. It wasn't polite enough to dump 200gb in my recycle bin.

daneyulebub17_ESO

Sheesh. I thought maybe you'd have some understandable, rational reason to think (albeit mistakenly) it might have been the cause---but seriously--what you got is: because it's the "last thing you installed " it has to be the culprit!!

Wow! No wonder, with a smoking gun like that, you rush to tell the world.

Yeah, somehow I'm just a teeny bit skeptical. (Rolls eyes so hard they look out the back of my head.)

Willow

Ok, so 2 people that know each other have had their hard drives wiped and the cause is ESO, out of thousands of people that have downloaded, installed and are playing the game?

Do you see where I am going with this?

Etchesketch

So while you were busy reading email and watching youtube, ESO was busily working behind your back deleting files on your secondary drive?

That IS evil.

Sorry about my first post... I honestly thought this was todays attempt at a joke thread.

Noswell

So I did google it, and came across this thread:
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/69062/warning-elder-scrolls-deletes-all-programs-bug
Were you uninstalling the game perhaps?

Valethar

Almost sounds like something killed the registry entries for that drive.

As a heads up for the troll talking about digging in the trash, there are ways to find deleted files that don't involve the trash can. People have been doing that since the DOS days.

Saerydoth

Alazais wrote: »

I'm not the only one this happened to, go ahead and google it. I know a friend who also had this happen when installing ESO, it wiped his drive. To me it wasn't when I was installing it but I'm not sure what exactly caused it, I didn't play it in 2 days.

The last thing I installed was ESO, the last thing I downloaded was ESO (onto that drive). I don't have a virus, but believe whatever you want. I'm not asking for anything (including ponies). I'm just angry and posting it here because if this happens to anybody else, they need to know they aren't the only ones.

Including me and my friend this is 2 people who've had it cause this kind of problem, go ahead and google ESO wiping out hard drives, sure it seems remote but it is happening.

I had installed only a hand full of addons tested for months by the community and listed on various sites as "must have addons", FTC, Loot drop, Harvester map etc.

I've been using computers for decades and haven't had a virus in so many years I can't even remember, yeah I'm blaming ESO because it's the only thing that has changed recently and there are records of it doing it to others, but go ahead and say I don't know what I'm doing.

2 days ago I was playing the game just fine, I didn't even touch the drive it's on for the next 40 odd hours, read email, watched youtube only on my C drive. Go to open the game tonight and "Launcher.exe is not a valid win32 application", go to the install folder and it's empty, along with 95% of everything on the drive. I google a bit and discover that it's happened to other people, anybody wanna suggest how I'm wrong? go right ahead.

That sounds, to me, like something else deleted everything, including ESO.

daneyulebub17_ESO

Google -any- major program and you'll find that some people claim it killed their hard drive. For most, you'll also find somebody somewhere claiming it gave 'em a virus, made their wife leave them, and caused their dandruff to come back.

The moral being, people say all kinds of insane, unlikely, implausible things on the internet. You know---like "ESO deleted all my files".

Alazais

daneyulebub17_ESO wrote: »

Sheesh. I thought maybe you'd have some understandable, rational reason to think (albeit mistakenly) it might have been the cause---but seriously--what you got is: because it's the "last thing you installed " it has to be the culprit!!

Wow! No wonder, with a smoking gun like that, you rush to tell the world.

Yeah, somehow I'm just a teeny bit skeptical. (Rolls eyes so hard they look out the back of my head.)

When you work with computers, and use them for 10+ hours a day and you change something, and shortly afterwards something goes wrong, it's not entirely unreasonable to think the change you made a day ago was the cause, and not the change you made 6 months ago.

Look, I'm not asking for anything, or looking to call this game crap or whatever, I actually really enjoyed it, but look at from my perspective - I'm genuinely concerned, it wiped out work files and if this happens to somebody who doesn't know how to use recovery software, they're in a pretty crappy position. I'm simply trying to warn others, cause it's possible, believe it or not.

Hyperventilate

Uhhh....

jkbennettb14a_ESO

Etchesketch wrote: »

I tried to click play and a black hole opened up and swallowed my entire laptop!!

I Demand a free pony and a wind up monkey as recompense.

Ooooooooo wind up monkey!

Saerydoth

daneyulebub17_ESO wrote: »

Google -any- major program and you'll find that some people claim it killed their hard drive. For most, you'll also find somebody somewhere claiming it gave 'em a virus, made their wife leave them, and caused their dandruff to come back.

The moral being, people say all kinds of insane, unlikely, implausible things on the internet. You know---like "ESO deleted all my files".

Exactly. To me, it looked like *something else* deleted everything on the hard drive, and ESO was an innocent victim. After all, it was removed as well.

Vlas

Your drive is failing...

Check your system log, see if it has errors related to the drive and bad sectors.

Alazais

Saerydoth wrote: »

daneyulebub17_ESO wrote: »

Google -any- major program and you'll find that some people claim it killed their hard drive. For most, you'll also find somebody somewhere claiming it gave 'em a virus, made their wife leave them, and caused their dandruff to come back.

The moral being, people say all kinds of insane, unlikely, implausible things on the internet. You know---like "ESO deleted all my files".

Exactly. To me, it looked like *something else* deleted everything on the hard drive, and ESO was an innocent victim.

And had this happened on it's own, i'd probably agree. However seeing as a friend of mine had his drive wiped also about 6 days ago, after googling it I discovered there was an error on some discs that means if you change the install directory the game just wipes out the install directory. I'm naturally suspcious, even though I wasn't installing or uninstalling the game I'm gonna link the two, and yes without proof but it's kinda suspect.

Etchesketch

Still confused here.

You keep saying ESO did this without input from you.

It happened while you were doing other things and the game was not on. If that's the case, it didn't happen and something else you were running or using did the damage.

If you installed the game onto your extra HD and didn't bother to put it in it's own folder and you also foolishly had your other "Important" files just laying around in the same general folder that you installed the game to and you uninstalled the game, then this might have happened. If the game deletes the folder (I don't know if it does or not) you tell it to create/install to, then your files in that folder could conceivably be deleted as well.

The problem is we aren't getting the real info on what happened.

Darzil

The linked thread suggests that the uninstaller removes everything in the install directory, rather than just those files the installer installed, so better hope it's in a directory by itself! This isn't best practice.

I have seen issues in the (distant) past with uninstalls that used environment variables. Indeed, once I mostly wiped someone's PC by accident that way. Basically in DOS if the O/S runs out of environment space to set up more variables, they are left as blank, and scripts run anyway. So a script that does "del c:%DIRECTORY%\*.* /s" instead does "del c:\*.* /s" and you're screwed!

daneyulebub17_ESO

No, it is entirely unreasonable to accuse software of deleting unrelated document files on its own with nothing for evidence other than it was the last thing you installed. No error messages, no log files, just I installed it yesterday and today I lost a bunch of files.

Did you check your event log? Do any real troubleshooting? Talk to anyone? Where were the files that were deleted? In a specific location? Did they end up in the recycling bin?

Anything's possible. I can't say 100% that bigfoot isn't under my desk right now. But based on the evidence, and past history, it's exceeeeeeedingly unlikely. Just like ESO being the cause of your files being "deleted" when viruses, or user error, are much, much more likely.

daneyulebub17_ESO

Valethar wrote: »

As a heads up for the troll talking about digging in the trash, there are ways to find deleted files that don't involve the trash can. People have been doing that since the DOS days.

Of course they have--Sheesh. But since he didn't mention it, it sounded much more likely that he was digging through the trash. He can always tell us if that's not the case. EDIT: Which he did in a later post. Swell.

And what's with the troll crap? Do you even know what a troll is? Love the way people have watered down that term to mean pretty much anyone that says something they don't agree with.

Etchesketch

jkbennettb14a_ESO wrote: »

Etchesketch wrote: »

I tried to click play and a black hole opened up and swallowed my entire laptop!!

I Demand a free pony and a wind up monkey as recompense.

Ooooooooo wind up monkey!

I know right?

Putok

Alazais wrote: »

2 days ago I was playing the game just fine, I didn't even touch the drive it's on for the next 40 odd hours, read email, watched youtube only on my C drive. Go to open the game tonight and "Launcher.exe is not a valid win32 application", go to the install folder and it's empty, along with 95% of everything on the drive. I google a bit and discover that it's happened to other people, anybody wanna suggest how I'm wrong? go right ahead.

Wait, so you think the game did this while it wasn't even running?

I'd suggest you not blame this on ESO, and look for the real underlying problem. And back up everything on that drive ASAP.

gunplummer

We just had a similar problem at work, a virus wiped some files off of a finance pc. We even have some high-end virus protection it got through. The directories were there but the save location was changed and files deleted. Even the expensive recovery programs couldn't recover the files. So I doubt it was ESO's fault.