Forums mIRC Help Erased (ini) files.

It's possible this should go in bug reports, but I have no idea quite how this happened and I'm not sure yet how to reproduce it. Besides that, it's 3am, and I'm not going to try to right now.

That said...Windows just BSOD'd on me...well, all right, it was a black screen; I didn't even /get/ to see the blue screen, but it's (almost) the same difference.

Upon rebooting, I opened my mIRC logs folder to rename the day's logs from .1 to normal, as usual (annoying, but not what I'm here about), and discovered, rather surprisingly, that there were no .1's. Don't know if that has anything to do with it, but I found it odd. (It did manage to record the three hours (midnight to 3am) in their correct logfiles, though.) So I opened mIRC up, and was absolutely shocked when it only connected to one network. (For the record, I'm currently active on two.)

Turns out something (maybe Windows, maybe mIRC) ERASED my script.ini and my remote.ini. It appears mIRC created a blank copy of each on post-reboot launch, so at least I can retype them, but still. mirc.ini and aliases.ini are intact, as well as servers.ini-my colors got changed around a bit ever so slightly (inactive editbox and treebar got reset, but everything else was preserved-weird, I know). I would just restore from mIRC's backup folder (from the previous install), but the remote.ini and script.ini that were there (at least, I'm 99% sure they were there) exist no longer, either.

Windows XP SP2 with mIRC 6.21. And no, I have no viruses/spyware/adware/etc. At least, none that are detectable (yet).

So I'm here partially venting and partially hoping someone can help me figure out just what on earth went wrong.

I'm hoping this is just some weird fluke.

My apologies for making this longer than it probably should be.

If any file is being written to when Windows crashes, that file can be corrupted. When restarting Windows, it may automatically run a check and repair on your drives depending on your settings. When that happens, corrupted files are often deleted. Note that you can have a similar effect if your hard drive is full when trying to write to a file.

And, no. It's not a mIRC bug. If anything, you should find out why Windows crashed and fix that problem. Check your System events log: Start Menu > Run > eventvwr.msc. Click System and look for errors around the time it crashed. You can check Applications and well, though that usually doesn't have anything regarding causes of crashing.

As mentioned above, this is most likely a Windows issue rather than a mIRC issue.

In recent versions of Windows, MS has started 'skipping' the BSOD message. This makes the crashes look 'prettier', but it makes it difficult to determine what the problem is. You can reenable the blue screens by doing this:

- Right click My Computer > properties
- Advanced tab > startup and recovery > settings
- System failure > uncheck "Automatically Restart"

(This may be slightly different on XP, as I'm using Vista)

-genius_at_work

I can't think of a reason why the files may have been in the process of being written to, as I haven't modified them in ages.

I checked the event viewer (System), and there's nothing (literally, NOTHING, ZIP, NADA) within about an hour and a half of the crash, and then before that there's just a bunch of Information messages telling me some services have stopped and/or started as applicable. None of them appear to have been the cause, and there are no Error messages any time recently. (Nothing in Applications around that time, either, though I doubt that will surprise anyone.)

I have BSODs set to display/not to automatically reboot, but thank you anyway. It didn't even blue screen on me, just black screened. For a second there I thought something may have happened with my video card, but it was fully functional upon reboot, and this would be the first real problem I've had with it /if/ it's the video card's fault...which I doubt.

I appreciate your fast responses, guys. Too bad complaining at MS won't help.

If the computer just *restarted* without any errors/blue screens, the problem could be power related. You could have experienced a momentary power drop (not necessarily noticable), or maybe the power supply in your computer is on its last legs and is going to die soon.

In any case, you don't have to be editing the mIRC files, but mIRC likely writes to/reads from them at many times. Another possibility is that your AV software automatically deleted those files without notifying you. That seems even more likely due to the fact that you mentioned the backup files are gone as well.

-genius_at_work