Corrupt Files - Unlucky!

Alright. I was farming Sunspear points outside of Yohlon Haven in Arkjok Ward in Nightfall. As I went back into Yohlon Haven, I accidentally exited out of the game on the loading screen at apparently just the worst moment. When I came back on Guild Wars a few hours later, instead of the normal loading start-up screen it said "Recovering data archive" and when I started playing this message saying "The file Gw.dat is corrupt. Please run the chkdsk utility." So I did run the chkdsk utility. I ran it about 5 times. The message is still coming up and I am wondering how exactly this happened and if I should uninstall and reinstall the game just in case? If anyone has any ideas, please help, thanks.

Corrupted Data Archives happen on a semi-regular basis. You can just wait and see if it fixes itself, or just reinstall.

My experience of the same thing has been that when it corrects itself there is something just a little be off about it. Last time my necro was casting weird - seems the casting animations got mixed up. Another time I've had mixed up textures. Generally I've found if the game reports a corrupted archive it is generally best to reinstall. On the plus side it doesn't happen more than about once a year, nonetheless I still keep a backup of the data archive just incase.

Thanks for the response, I guess I better just reinstall. I havn't backed up the files, could I do that by just copying all the files to a separate folder or something?

I used to get this problem now and then. I tested my memory, found bad memory, replaced it, and I've never had the problem since. It's been over a year since then.

To back up the game just copy the gw.dat file to another location on a regular basis. It is normally around the 3.5g so be sure you have the room for it - I've found DVDs are good for this.

In reality you only need to back this up once. Generally the new stuff put into game is not going to cause ridiculous load times like a fresh install will. Remember to copy your templates folder before you re-install.

Data archives can be corrupted due to bad memory or bad disk sectors, but these are not the only causes. Software conflicts can and will also cause these problems occassionally. You can help minimise the risk by keeping your computer "clean", defragged, uptodate, regular scans (both anti-virus and memory and disk sector scans), but this will not eliminate the (potential) problem.

Any hardware failure will also show up in other areas of your PC. This is to say, if you are only having a problem with GW and no other games or programs it is unlikely to be a hardware problem. If you are having problems with games only, it may be a graphics card issue - but this there is no certainty in this.

Not so, when I had the bad memory, this was the ONLY symptom I had. I was skeptical because of the total lack of other symptoms, but I ran the memory scan anyway, and sure enough, bad memory.

Ralgha, I find this hard to believe as bad RAM (as opposed to disk sectors) is not selective in its actions. This might be the case if the only processing intensive program you run is GW, something accessing the RAM more frequently than any other application you have open on your computer, thereby coming up against errors more frequently than any other program did. What might be more likely is that other symptoms were there but you simply didn't notice.

Those who want to test their hardware should seek out MemTest. It has a fairly comprehensive suite of tests for establishing whether or not there are hardware issues.

I'm not so sure... I hear about this happening all the time. People will say "but it's only happening in game xxx, not in game yyy or zzz. It's got to be game xxx's fault!" Later, we find out it's bad RAM, or overclocking, or something like that after all.

Guild Wars may just happen to use an address in memory when decompressing a file that another program may just use for something a little more benign, like audio or video memory. For instance, you could lose quite large number of bits in a PCM audio stream before you'd even notice the corruption (this is why CD players work fine even with scratched CDs).

Different programs stress a computer in different ways. If you have bad RAM (or other bad hardware), it's just a crapshoot as to what might be affected, and in what way. That's what makes it so hard to pinpoint.

theres an easier fix also covered i think in the tech section - del the .dat file within gw folder and run game - it will slowly download and make new dat file .
Faster way is to del dat file and use the -image trick - search for the details on guru and you shud find full instructions on use

Try this first:

Obviously changing the path as necessary. Worth a shot.

To clarify Snoggie above - it's sort of the same as running -image.

Right click on the GW shortcut, select "properties", and edit the "target" line so that it says something like:

"C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\gw.exe" -repair

The exact path may vary, but the above is the default. The "-repair" should be outside the quotes ("). Unlike -image, GW will run with the -repair switch in place, but it's probably good to remove it after the repair is complete.

I prefer deleting the dat file then -image as ive had gw before on every startup repair the dat file and -repair didnt solve the problem.From what i read -repair will download files but if the datfiles corrupted it sort of stays corrupted to an extent.
We all have to remember that the datfiles similar to a cache and any abnormalities to it saving data ( gw bombing out/lag possibly an so on ) disrupts the cache - we`ve all downloaded a file from web before some stage and its not downloaded correctly and this is similar.
Also scandisk the drive and defrag as bad sectors/blocks can also cause probs.

Also -repair only repairs the datfile but -image does one big download and usually downloads any updates and most maps - saves loading times in places.
When eotn had its preview i did -image night before and i went in for first time with a team and i waited 2 mins for everyone else to load up.

Thats just my experiances

Yes, -repair only repairs the .dat, it doesn't replace it. I was just trying to save the OP several hours of possibly unnecessary downloading.

Also - oops, I missed the quotes in my code. Thanks, Quaker