The Forgotten Mod for Half-Life The Darkness retires for now... news

Computers are just great... until they stop working and then they're just fucking awful.

Yesterday I was watching a video file of footage for the upcoming Silent Hill Homecoming game and all of a sudden the computer just rebooted, I thought it had got a bit hot or something since it was a HD video and so I just waited till it started up again.

Except it didn't, it gave me the option to load safe mode with or without networking/command prompt, last known good configuration and start windows normally, it didn't matter what I clicked, nothing happened, a black screen came up and it just hanged. After several restarts I gave up, switched off all the power and left it alone for hours. Later I came back to it and all of a sudden it loaded up, with that damned 'your system has recovered from a serious error' box appearing. So I just went through my files to see if everything was ok for about 10 minutes and then boom.. a blue screen. No error message apart from the STOP (insert random characters here) at the bottom. Then, you guessed it.. it wouldn't boot up again.

My first thought was the recovery console on the XP disc, so I inserted that and waited for it to boot from the disc but it just went to a blue screen saying press F2 to enter the ASR and when I pressed that it didn't do anything. I'll probably get it to load if I leave it again but it'll probably blue screen again if there is a real problem. Anyhow, The Forgotten material is all backed up on several different drives along with other stuff, a good 90% of the data is safe so if I have to flatten it then it's not a big deal. I think the next step here is to slave the drive and see what I can grab from it, a similiar thing happened to a friend's hard-drive whereby it wouldn't boot but the data was fine.

Obviously this means that work on TF is going to be halted for awhile, as I have a full-time job in the week and wont get a chance to do anything until next weekend, which means that the August media release will be pushed back even further.. I'm so sorry! I'm really pissed off right now, I get little time to work on it as it is without this shit happening. Grrr.