Lost my savegame

[suarve]

OMFG OMFG!

Right, I got the dreaded red lights issue with my 360 a few hours ago. I walk into the shop where i bought it and exchange my faulty 360 for a brand new one within a few minutes (kept harddrive though). I now reconnect everything, recover my gamerprofile (as it is corrupt - wtf?) and load up my game of the moment - earth defense force 2017. I have put over 40 hours into this and am 3 or 4 levels away from complweting hardest.

Anyway, I am at the start up screen and select to load my saved game from the harddrive as normal. To my total disbelief (im still gutted as i type this out) i get a message saying there is NO, yes NO saved games. I quickly go into the memory option from the dashboard and see that the saved game file for EF2017 has a nasty yellow exclamation mark by it and has the words - "CORRUPTED SAVED GAME" by it. Yes you guessed it, over 40 hours of gameplay gone. I'm totally gutted. I even had 164 of the 171 weapons too.

Simply can't believe it.

 

[suarve]

OMFG OMFG!

As i quite annoyed now i decided to vent my anger on someone from xbox support. yes im quite they are totally useless but i just called them up no the less. How some of these people end up working in support center for a console i will never know. The support was that bad and the lack of resolve offerred i couldn't hep but chuckle to myself.

• I dial the number and after a few mins get through to someone.
• They take my phone number and it apparently takes their computers 5 minutes to find my account.
• Right, we're getting somewhere now she has my gamerprofile. I now have to confirm every single details i have registered with them, yippie.
• Anyways, onwards. I explain my (rather simple) problem - 3 rings of death, get new console console back home, reconnect everything, recover gamerprofile, load up game, no saved games showing, 40 hours of gameplay lost etc etc.
• "ok sir, ill put you on hold for about 2 mins and check this out", fair enough.
• A few mins later we have the following suggestion: try switching you console on then off and re-download your content from the marketplace.
• wtf????????????? I then explained exactly what a saved game file was and the operater seemed to understand. she goes away for another few mins.
• She gives me a refernce number. I ask how this will help with the problem i have just described to her. She says "oh yes, your problem". lol.
• She now suggests that there may have been a problem with the "electricity". She tells me i need to make sure my console is turned off before re-atatching my hard drive (which it obviously was!!!!).
• Onto the next suggestion - have you had any powersurges in your area recently sir? I felt like asking her if she was having a laugh, but still i answer no.
• Off she goes for another few mins and comes back with the best "solution" yet. "your problem definately occurred between you switching consoles". I gave her a cookie for stating the obvious. omg!
• At this point i begin to get sl;ightly annoyed, as its blatently obvious she has idea what she is talking about, or is reading from some sort of list.
• She answers by saying there is nothing they can do as "the content im missing is not stored on their servers, it is stored on your xbox 360 console". Well, you learn something new everyday i suppossed. /sighs.
• She then suggests "you could re-reply some of the game to re-gain your progress".
• At this point i say thanks for all the ingenious solutions and prepare to hang up.
• But wait, she then gives me another reference (for my call this time). Apparently, this will allow any future related problems to be solved faster. I was worried there for second.

Again, i wasn't expecting anything at all from their support and tbh didn't get anything (apart from my 2 reference numbers - wohohho!!!). The level of support given was none existant. Im still quite annoyed but still laughing at the support line.

 

[suarve]

Looks like its time to sell EF2017.

Na ill play it again. Can easily complete easy,normal and hard in about 8 hours now i know what to do. Its just seriously annoying being so close to beating hardest and having my character so highly levelled up.

 

[suarve]

You slagging off someone who hasnt been trained for the job by the company who you give your money too. Dont **** off the lass, have a go at the company. I worked in a call centre and tried my best, but none of us were properly trained, which wasnt our fault.
And not everyone knows about how electrical equipment and computing things work, the girl probably hasnt seen a hard-drive, you do know seeing the inside working of a computer will make you part of the minority.
I prefer my girls the type who are into girl things, not hard-drives, and xboxs, or overclocking etc.


Can you plug the hard-disk into a pc? have a blast at data recovery programs, its worth a shot right? Have a look see if theres any applications that do that and run on the xbox aswell? worth a try really, dont have a 360 so dont know too much about it, but iv had data recovery saving me quite a lot of bother on ipod data problems

I see you point, i've worked in a call center for a brief period too you know. However, as a customer, the fact that they clearly have training needs isn't my fault at all. If I call up with a techical issue, at the very least you'd expect her to have the knowledge to understand what im asking. I'll have a look into your suggestions too.

I also take your point about girls not being into computery stuff too, but at the end of the day i had (and still do) a problem and she was totally clueless aboput even the basic things i was asking. She sounded like she was reading off some sort of script of solutions to offer me. I mean asking me about power surges, come on. :|

 

[suarve]

That is unlucky...what else can you do really, play through it again if you love the game as much as it seems. If that had happened to my oblivion save which i put at least 120 hours into (it was a slow summer A levels had finished i had nothing to do lol) i would have gone insane.

When i was getitng slightly annoyed towards the end of the call i said:

"So if i was to go and play again for another 40 hours and the same happened again, you still wouldn't be able to offer an answer or solution even then". She says no (in so many words). Basically, if your save ever says "corrupted" next to it, its gone.

I think know what the problem was anyways.

As far as i know your gamerprofile is linked to all your saved games through some of hash code. If i tried to load up a save on another profile it wouldn't work. I pretty sure that when i recovered my gamerprofile (which took 40 minutes to download may i add!!!!) this hash was somehow altered, therefore all the saved games corrupted. I'm sure its something along those lines. bleh.

 

[suarve]

I had a problem like this except on PS3, I loaded up my PS3, put the disc in to find NO SAVE GAMES (40 hours of tonyhawks) then I realised I opened my US account instead of my UK one.

goes to check regional settings...........

EDIT: no luck

 

[suarve]

What exactly were you expecting the support to do?

At least offer some sort of advice. I never expected them to fix anything tbh, the fact they knew nothing is quite worrying.

 

[suarve]

HAving rerading a bit on the xbox.com forums apparently each game save is linked to the console id and gamer profile id. So the fact i recovered my gamertag and changed consoles totally messed everything up i think.

 

[suarve]

my thoughts aswell, they cant recover items i'd have thought. if they could then i'd have phoned ofcourse.
Any idea how it ended up being corrupt? i mean did you turn off the power when disconnecting the hdd?

lol of course i turned off the power rofl. Im not a total noob

I wasn't expecting them to magically make the save un corrupted, I just wanted confirmation of exactly why it happened. I mean i wouldn;t want to put 40 hours into another game and for the same to happen again, would i?

 

[suarve]

HAH, id get on the phone and ask them do they think its acceptable for your save-games become invalid because you had claim a new console under warranty as it became faulty? surely they should be able to change something at their end so that it will work again?

Apparently you can clear the game cache for your chosen game if this happens (copy files from HD to a mem unit) and this should solve the problem. However, just tried and no luck.

I'd just really like to know 100% what caused this.

 

[suarve]

That's the reason I have a HDD and Memory Card, I always backup to the Memory Card every 'x' amount of hours of gameplay time.

yer, i may start doing that again. Or even saving to multiple game save slots in-game.

I'm kind lucky in a sense. Everything i have played since my last profile recovery (around 6 months ago) has been lost due to all game files in that period being corrupted. When i play a game i tend to whore it until iv got everything out of it i can, i know a lot of people play several games at once and progress like that. So everything apart from my EDF2017 save (and the MUA save - was close to 4000 kills) is of not too much value in essence. Also, EDF2010 is a seriosuly good game to play, I know for a fact ill regain my stats and get all my progress back, its just a shame i have to repeat stuff :/

 

[suarve]

This really annoys me, and I'm certain that MS make the recovery process slow deliberately to stop people from switching between consoles all the time and sharing arcade games.

Yer, im on a 2MB line. When i looked in the memory section of the dashboard my profile was 8MB, so i must have been downloading really slow.

 

[suarve]

You can as long as the profile linked to the save games is on the hard drive, ie a recovered profile from live.

Thats exactly what i tried mate. After reading a bit on the xbox.com forums it seems that the saves are linked to the one instance of your profile - as each profile you create has a different hash generated to it. So if i was recover my profile again it follows my new saves since would be corrupt again. Please correct me if im wrong and there is another way of doing it im missing.

 

[suarve]

I dont know what it is in the profile that takes so long to download . I do remember when I recovered my account it took AGES to recover it onto my memory card. You do the same with me at games, play them to death and never play them again? Which in this case is lucky

wouldn't say i never play them again, i just get borted very easily. Typing this I have just realised my Crackdown save (with maxed out abilities on everything) is now gone. Balls if i cba to do that again

 

[suarve]

Ugh... Its bringing back how I felt when it happened to me I wouldn't say you need to worry though, you're gamerscore shows that you're an uber l33t pro not the game saves

After having a look through my games played and corrupted saves below are the ones im most peeved about:

1. E2017 - 40 hours gone (4700 Stamina, 164 weapons, hardest nearly beaten)
2. MUA - so so close to 4000 kills, have several characters levelled up very high, loads of credits too - all gone
3. Crackdown - had character maxxed out abilities.
4. Was going to re-play Dead Rising now i have a HD style set up. Character was at level 50 too - pretty much all extras unlocked too. needed one item for the full megaman suit, had megablaster etc. sigh. Probably put another 30 odd hours into this as i needed to play through the game several times.

Anyway, they are saves i'm most devasted about. Know for a fact i'll be working on EDF2017 again in the comming weeks, as for the rest i'll just have to bite the bullet

 

[suarve]

Hmmm, if that happened to me I'd probably sell all my games and get a fresh batch!

I own 10 games at the moment, with 5 of those constantly being swapped/traded in etc. There are a few i'd never sell, evah!