I need help!! PLEASE!!

[falkonisback]

My league that I was on my 87th season corrupted last night!!! It gave a fatal error and shut down (I thought that was bad b/c I had just won the 1986 world series and I hadn't saved it yet). Then when I goto load the league, it loads everything and when it gets to 100% (Finalizing Database), it just sits there....The league will not load. It doesn't give me any kind of fatal errors or anything, it just does nothing. When it gets to that point, if I click somewhere, OOTP will stop responding. I didn't have a backup (I know, shame on me). Has this ever happened to any of you and if so, is there anything you could think of that I might be able to do to try to fix it and get it to load again? I would hate to have to start ALL over after 87 seasons!!! Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks.

[Neags23]

Just let it keep loading when it gets to the finalizing database screen. It's not officially corrupted until it tells you so.

I let mine 'finalize' for over an hour once before it finally popped up.

Good luck.

[falkonisback]

Originally Posted by Neags23

Just let it keep loading when it gets to the finalizing database screen. It's not officially corrupted until it tells you so.

I let mine 'finalize' for over an hour once before it finally popped up.

Good luck.

Well I had let it finalize for about 20 min then I decided that it wasn't going to happen..I hadn't let it keep finalizing for longer than that..I can try it though. The thing is that the league would normally load pretty quickly, like with 1 or 2 min. I can try it tonight and just leave it on and see if it works. Just a quick question about what happened to you...was this after OOTP gave an error and closed out that you had to let it go for an hour before it finally opened again? If so, then this is pretty good news for me. Thanks for the quick response.</br>Anybody else have any other thoughts on this?

[ctorg]

This is exactly why I don't think I'm paranoid when I back up every season and at the end of any session of playing the game. I have had this happen, and it's been hard enough to lose half a season, never mind 87 years!

[1998 Yankees]

I can only add that I agree with Neags in that, after an ABEND, it seemed to me that the game spent much more time on that "Finalizing" stage, as if it were rebuilding stuff. 87 years may take a looooooong time to do so. I would reboot, start fresh, and give it an hour or two before I gave up on it.

[falkonisback]

Thanks for the help guys. That's what I will be doing tonight and I HOPE that it works. If it does, you can bet that I'll be backing up my league file at least every 3 seasons.

Does the in game backup feature really work? How do you restore one of those backups? Would it be better just to copy the enitre league folder onto a separate hard drive to back it up? What do you guys suggest? The reason I want to know this and the reason why I say I will back it up at least every 3 seasons is b/c if copying the entire league folder is a better way, then that would just take entirely too long to do it after every season...If the in game backup works fine for problems like this and corrupted league files, then I would have no problem doing that after every season.

[ctorg]

If you have WinRAR (which is better than zipping files and can be downloaded as shareware, I believe), you can use the batch file in this zip. I've found it to be the best way to back up.

[Corsairs]

Let me suggest that you try this: rename your "faces.dat" file to "faces.old" and see if that allows you to access your league. Fair warning: even if this works, you'll lose all player picture associations. But hopefully it'll let you back in, and that's what counts at this point.

[falkonisback]

Cool, that's the kind of advice I wanted from you guys b/c I know that has fixed some problems in the past for people. I have a couple questions though..I understand that you say that all player picture associations will be lost, but wouldn't it grab the player's picture from the picture folder in my league being that the pictures are named according to the player's player_id? Or does it save over all of the player's pictures when it re-creates the faces.dat file? If that is the case, couldn't I just copy all of my player's pictures to another folder than copy them back once the new faces.dat file is created? Would that work?

[Neags23]

Try letting 'finalizing' run its course before deleting .dat files.

If it finally tells you the league is corrupted, go that route.

Mine took an hour to finalize after my computer spontaneously restarted.

[Corsairs]

All I can say is that nothing I have tried has preserved the associations once faces.dat becomes corrupt. I've begun making regular backups of faces.dat so that I copy a good version over a newly corrupted one. That way you only lose the associations made since the last backup. It's a hassle, but better safe than sorry.

So did renaming faces.dat allow you to access your league again?

[RchW]

Originally Posted by falkonisback

Thanks for the help guys. That's what I will be doing tonight and I HOPE that it works. If it does, you can bet that I'll be backing up my league file at least every 3 seasons.

Does the in game backup feature really work? How do you restore one of those backups? Would it be better just to copy the enitre league folder onto a separate hard drive to back it up? What do you guys suggest? The reason I want to know this and the reason why I say I will back it up at least every 3 seasons is b/c if copying the entire league folder is a better way, then that would just take entirely too long to do it after every season...If the in game backup works fine for problems like this and corrupted league files, then I would have no problem doing that after every season.

I back up every season using 7zip. 12 - 15 minutes is worthwhile.

During the season I back up in game as I remember. However I delete those at the end of each season.

So far so good for 50 seasons.

[falkonisback]

Originally Posted by Corsairs

So did renaming faces.dat allow you to access your league again?

Well I'm at work right now so I haven't had a chance to try it. I won't be able to try it out until I get back home later tonight.

[Raidergoo]

Originally Posted by RchW

I back up every season using 7zip. 12 - 15 minutes is worthwhile.

I strongly recommend 7zip.

http://www.7-zip.org/

[Mike Donlin]

This--the never ending finalizing--has frequently happened to me, and I usually just give up on the league. I'll be interested
if it does in fact eventually load.

Keep us updated, falkonisback.

[Eugene Church]

I hope it will reload for you.

Good Luck.

[falkonisback]

Thanks guys..I will definitely let you know how it turns out.

[thomamon]

I have a .bat file backup my leagues to an external drive every night at 2:00am

[falkonisback]

Originally Posted by thomamon

I have a .bat file backup my leagues to an external drive every night at 2:00am

Wow, automatically?? Do you think I could use it?

[falkonisback]

IT WORKED IT WORKED IT WORKED!!!!!!! It didn't even take that long to load, maybe 20 minutes. I just let it load and waited. I almost soiled myself when I walked back into the room and seen that my league was loaded. You can bet that I'm gonna start making regular backups now!! Thanks to everyone for all of your help!!!