Repairing Data Archive?

Alright, so I hope on guildwars in the morning, play completely fine for a while, then move onto some classwork; this is nothing out of the ordinary for me. After the classwork, I decide it's time for some more gaming, I click the guildwars icon, and I'm suddenly hit with a message over a loading bar that reads "Repairing Data Archive". When that bar finishes, I sign on, and I'm forced to download over 60,000 files at a countless number of megs. I finish that, and now whenever I enter anywhere in the game, random arenas, towns, guild halls, halls levels, etc, I'm forced to download that too. I checked my GW. dat file when it was redownloading initially, and I'm pretty sure Guildwars isn't a 183 meg game.

I already scanned for bad sectors on my harddrive, which was a-okay. My computer is approaching 4 years old, which shouldn't be enough to throw it out of commission yet (no overclocking + good maintenance).

This isn't the first time this has happened. It appears to me that some error in the dat file caused a complete re-download. I'm going to reinstall the game later today, which I'm nearly positive will fix it, but this is really inconvinient. Anyone know what might cause this?

The same thing happened to me just recently.

I was playing like normal then when I was finished my game-break I closed out of GW and turned off my external hard drive (my laptop doesn't have enough memory on it to store on the internal one).

A few hours later the same thing that you discribed happened to me.

I just shrugged it off - if there's a long load ahead of my I just warn my party that I'll load long and wait for the good times to roll.

Basically GW detected a corruption problem with your .dat file and attempted to fix it. I'm guessing the problem was serious since normally the .dat file is the same size it was before the attempted repair.

You could always try to defragment your HDD, i got that message once in a while, it's been a very long time since any repair occured since i defragmented though.

You don't have to reinstall, just run the -image command, and let it download everything it needs.

The game client isn't the big part, it's the .dat file that holds all the game info.

Forget about defragging. It may make things faster but unless there's something seriously wrong with the file system or the physical drive the standard file read/write functions should produce exactly the same results even if the file's fragmented into millions of pieces on the drive. If they don't, you should probably be running chkdsk and not Guild Wars

Anyways, from what I've seen on this forum before it seems that if the gw.dat file gets messed up badly enough the game may be unable to repair it completely, and it may break again once it's used in a certain way. If your client's seemingly randomly (re-)downloading stuff it should already have, your gw.dat may have broken like this. I don't think there's any better way to fix it than deleting the file and letting gw -image run overnight.

gah. no point in letting it re-image it if I can install some of the files at normal speed (as opposed to ~150 kb/sec for the download).

wierd stuff.