Not too long ago, I decided it was about time I defragged my hard drive. As is my usual practice, I used Norton Speed Disk. I use Speed Disk only because it allows me to place my Windows and Program Files directories at the start of the hard disk, which speeds things up just a touch (it seems to me, at any rate).
But to my horror, after defragging the drive with Speed Disk, I found I could no longer play BF2 in singleplayer mode.
Yikes! I thought. Oh well. That's not too bad; I don't usually host our coop LAN games anyway, or didn't then. So no problem, thought I.
Except...
I then tried to play online. But I found - to growing horror, yes, you guessed it - that I couldn't. Ping time too high, I hear you think?
Nope.
Then maybe it was PunkBuster. PunkBuster always screws up!
Nope.
Or perhaps it was the phantom "There is a problem with your connection" sneaking up on me, and slapping me around the head roughly?
And... nope.
No, none of these. Far, far worse. It was the dreaded... the feared... the hated and loathed...
"Your CD-key is not valid"
Half-enraged, half(you can guess the word - yes!)-horrified, I scratched my forehead. I peered at the screen. I'd had this before, once or twice, where servers had given that output but then I'd successfully connected a few minutes later. Figuring this was a bug of some sort or an error caused by heavy load on the gamespyid servers (I think those are the ones that check the cdkey and such?), I shrugged, relaxing back into my chair. I repositioned my headset dramatically, clicking on another server.
But...
Again. The same.
Blinking rapidly now and trying to figure out some supertechnical reason why this wasn't working (and already blaming my woefully awful ISP, Toucan, who are a reseller for Tiscali, and have a 3gb per week limit we breach every week, and who are generally the lead villain in reality for me at the moment), I frowned and tried again.
Same result.
Reboot. Restart game. Try again. Another failure. Some futile shouting and waving of arms occured, and then I tried again. Same result. Shutdown. Wait ten seconds.
And repeat and wash. After some of this, I grew irritated (okay, enraged and furious), and decided to find out what the hell was going on.
And then I found it. Apparently, the cdkey entry in the Windows registry can become somewhat skewed - or should I say, had become somewhat skewed for some people - when a certain patch version was installed.
I hadn't installed that patch version.
I thought back. What had I done? What had changed on my system?
And in the end, only one thing had changed. I hadn't even downloaded a file that day, it turned out. A quick check of my harddrive confirmed that only four applications had been run that particular day: Open Office (which never killed BF2 or anything else before and hasn't since), SimpleMU (which I've run for years without problems), Calculator, and...
Speed Disk.
The only one which changed my system, naturally, was Speed Disk.
Upon examination, I discovered that my cdkey had been decrypted in the registry - at least, that's what it looked like. Anyone who knows what that particular registry key looks like will know that their cdkey is encrypted after entry at install, and placed into said registry key in what looks like hexadecimal format. Mine was in it's native form.
The Special Forces registry key, however, was normal. Hexadecimal entry, encrypted.
Right, thought I.
Special Forces is fired up. And onto a server I go with no issues.
I am still utterly bemused as to the mechanics of what occurred, but I'm now fairly sure (after some investigation) that the cause of this was Speed Disk, and it's shifting either/or Program Files and Windows to the start of my hard disk (physically speaking).
Therefore:
Be warned. Speed Disk MAY screw up your BF2 installation.
But to my horror, after defragging the drive with Speed Disk, I found I could no longer play BF2 in singleplayer mode.
Yikes! I thought. Oh well. That's not too bad; I don't usually host our coop LAN games anyway, or didn't then. So no problem, thought I.
Except...
I then tried to play online. But I found - to growing horror, yes, you guessed it - that I couldn't. Ping time too high, I hear you think?
Nope.
Then maybe it was PunkBuster. PunkBuster always screws up!
Nope.
Or perhaps it was the phantom "There is a problem with your connection" sneaking up on me, and slapping me around the head roughly?
And... nope.
No, none of these. Far, far worse. It was the dreaded... the feared... the hated and loathed...
"Your CD-key is not valid"
Half-enraged, half(you can guess the word - yes!)-horrified, I scratched my forehead. I peered at the screen. I'd had this before, once or twice, where servers had given that output but then I'd successfully connected a few minutes later. Figuring this was a bug of some sort or an error caused by heavy load on the gamespyid servers (I think those are the ones that check the cdkey and such?), I shrugged, relaxing back into my chair. I repositioned my headset dramatically, clicking on another server.
But...
Again. The same.
Blinking rapidly now and trying to figure out some supertechnical reason why this wasn't working (and already blaming my woefully awful ISP, Toucan, who are a reseller for Tiscali, and have a 3gb per week limit we breach every week, and who are generally the lead villain in reality for me at the moment), I frowned and tried again.
Same result.
Reboot. Restart game. Try again. Another failure. Some futile shouting and waving of arms occured, and then I tried again. Same result. Shutdown. Wait ten seconds.
And repeat and wash. After some of this, I grew irritated (okay, enraged and furious), and decided to find out what the hell was going on.
And then I found it. Apparently, the cdkey entry in the Windows registry can become somewhat skewed - or should I say, had become somewhat skewed for some people - when a certain patch version was installed.
I hadn't installed that patch version.
I thought back. What had I done? What had changed on my system?
And in the end, only one thing had changed. I hadn't even downloaded a file that day, it turned out. A quick check of my harddrive confirmed that only four applications had been run that particular day: Open Office (which never killed BF2 or anything else before and hasn't since), SimpleMU (which I've run for years without problems), Calculator, and...
Speed Disk.
The only one which changed my system, naturally, was Speed Disk.
Upon examination, I discovered that my cdkey had been decrypted in the registry - at least, that's what it looked like. Anyone who knows what that particular registry key looks like will know that their cdkey is encrypted after entry at install, and placed into said registry key in what looks like hexadecimal format. Mine was in it's native form.
The Special Forces registry key, however, was normal. Hexadecimal entry, encrypted.
Right, thought I.
Special Forces is fired up. And onto a server I go with no issues.
I am still utterly bemused as to the mechanics of what occurred, but I'm now fairly sure (after some investigation) that the cause of this was Speed Disk, and it's shifting either/or Program Files and Windows to the start of my hard disk (physically speaking).
Therefore:
Be warned. Speed Disk MAY screw up your BF2 installation.
Last edited by Auqakuh2213 (2006-03-13 07:30:28)