Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) General A Question Regarding A System Reformat

I am going to be reformatting my entire system, therefore, losing everything. I am going to put all of my data files onto a CD-R. I was wondering if I can just take the Divine Divinity saved files, and put those onto a disc, reinstall the game once everything is up and running again, and start from that save point. My computer has been a real piece as of late, and I am going to start from scratch and have a reformat, and finally get rid of the terrible operating system Windows ME, and get Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I think I am going with 2000 though, as I hear it may not have as many features, but is more stable. Well, someone get back to me as to if I can do that with this game. I did it with Never Winter Nights, and it turned out alright with that.

Yes, you can do it. Either zip the saved game folders first, or make sure you clear the read-only attribute after restoring them from CD-R. Also, make sure you install the patch before trying to load them, if they were saved with it installed.

What do you speak of when you say clearing the read only attribute. When I did it with Never Winter Nights, I saved the save game files onto a CD-R, and put them back into the save game folder when I re-installed the game, and loaded up the game, went to load game, they were all there for me to click on and I loaded one up to play. That was a solid RPG too. I had not cleared the read only attribute on that. Can you elaborate just a bit further to me as to what that is, as you can see, I do not know all that much about computers.

Any files copied from a CD-R will be marked as read-only, since they can not be edited on the CD. In Explorer, if you select a group of files, right click and select Properties, it should list the files' attributes (read-only, archive, hidden, system); uncheck the read-only box. Divinity assumes it can open files for editing and doesn't check this first.

Thanks so much, I am sorry if I bothered you any. Do you have any other reccomendations other than puting files onto a CD-R I figured that would be the easiest way considering that is what I did with it last time. Sorry to bother. Trust me, its not like I enjoy bother other people on message boards about system reformats, I'd be enjoying myself more posting more regarding the game it self. It took me originally 4 1/2 hours to reformat my PC last time. It has 1.8 ghz, 256 RAM and runs like a piece of junk now. Everything loads so choppy, and Divinity should be running a lot better than it does. Thats why I am going to do this.

Backing them up to a CD-R is fine. Just zip them first if you do not want to worry about the read-only attribute; when you extract the files they will keep their original attributes.
BTW, If you were bothering me, I could just not answer. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/evilgrin1.gif" alt="" />

Another idea, possibly too late, is to partition your hard drive into two separate drives. My 40Gb hard drive has a main partition of 36Gb formatted as NTSF, suitable for Windows XP and most other things. The other is a 4Gb FAT32 partition so I have a storage area and somewhere to play old DOS games. I have done a reformat recently and all I had to do was zip up everything that needed backing up and copy it to the spare drive. Then I could reformat my Windows drive with no worries.

Thanks!