Error: CreateDirectory...

[tsarchristopher 1]

Greetings!

Sometimes strange things happen without any interference from me. Just this morning, without playing SimCity 4 my computer crashed and restarted. Once it rebooted, everything was back to normal...so I thought.

 

Later that day I opened SimCity 4 and immediately I received the message "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable." Not knowing how to proceed, I uninstalled the program, then reinstalled the program and the same message appeared. At the top of the message box it shows "Error: CreateDirectory(C:\Users\CHRIST~1\AppData\Local\Temp..."

 

Currently I am using a Dell XPS8500 with iCore i7-3770 CPU at 3.40 GHz and Windows 8.1

 

Thoughts on how to proceed or are my SimCity 4 days over?

THANKS!!!!

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Sounds like file system trouble.  8.1 is supposed to be able to run NTFS maintenance tasks on its own, but may have failed (and caused that crash).  I don't know whether Microshaft has messed up the maintenance tools, but if not you can try this:

 

Note: this will only work on rotating storage.  Do not try this if you are using an SSD.

 

Go to My Computer and right click on the icon of your disk drive.  On the first or second maintenance panel you should be able to find a button labelled CHKDSK.  Click this once, close out this section, and do a cold boot on your machine.  That is, power it off, let it sit for a minute or two, then start it up.  CHKDSK runs before the windows boot can load the file system, and it checks the hard drive for errors and tries to repair any it finds.  It may report failure, in which case you need a technician.  This exercise could take a half an hour to complete or even more.

 

If you get a successful boot after this exercise, try the game again.  If there is still no soap, go back to the disk drive in My Computer and find the button that says "Disk Cleanup" and click it.  This program will walk your entire disk looking for files that have been left lying about by misbehaving applications such as temporaries that should have been released, old update files, etc.  Takes a long time, and when it finishes will give you a list of files it wants to drop.  Usually it is OK to say yes to all of them.

 

Disk Cleanup may have left a lot of holes in your file system.  These can be cleaned up by running the "Disk Defragmenter" which should also be a button on the disk maintenance panel.  What happens here is that the program moves all the files in such a way that files that are in many pieces (city files, for example) due to overflowing the original file space, get consolidated into one piece (called extent). 

 

The purpose of this is to reduce the number of disk head movements when running production.  It may also speed up your system somewhat.  After this exercise is finished, boot your machine again.

 

Now try the game.  If still no soap, then something is seriously wrong.  I hope you have access to a local, friendly computer geek because this kind of thing needs personal attention.  I am sorry to suggest you may have had a disk head crash, which could have destroyed the recording surface of your disk.

[tsarchristopher 1]

Thanks for the info and guidance! Upon further investigation, the system experienced an error 0xc... system crash. After a few disk clean ups and attempting to do a system restore, the system repaired itself. It seems with this Dell there is a recovery/assist application that was triggered to repair the errors before a system restoration could be started. As of now, the errors had been repaired...THANKS!