Quantcast

News

New EVE Online Patch Leaves Windows XP Nonfunctional

By Alex Petraglia on Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:00 AM EST  

Staying up late and trolling for gaming news always has its perks. There’s nothing quite like finding out at 1 AM that the latest patch for EVE Online, the rather controversial persistent-world sci-fi MMO, is leaving countless players without a working operating system.

The new patch, dubbed ‘Trinity,’ was released via the game’s updater earlier today in three packages: “classic,” “classic to premium,” and “full.” Classic, which provides new content but not a graphics overhaul, functioned as it should. As did the full option, which provides the added content and updated graphics.

But those who opted for “classic to premium” were in for a nasty surprise: the update was overwriting Windows XP’s ‘boot.ini,’ an essential startup file.

EVE itself relies on its own independent and evidently poorly named ‘boot.ini’ file, stored in the ‘\CCP\EVE’ directory. The patch, however, wasn’t applying the update to EVE’s own boot.ini file, but instead to Windows XP’s, leaving the operating system unable to boot upon restart.

Windows Vista, which does not rely on boot.ini for startup functionality, was not affected.

It is not currently known whether or not developer CCP has corrected this issue, so it is strongly recommended that players not attempt to update the game until further details are given.

For those affected by the bug, Microsoft has instructions on how to restore Windows XP’s startup boot.ini.

The content provided in the patch itself is bountiful, including added interface flexibility and a new assortment of ships. But any substantial positive gains will undoubtedly be overshadowed by this mishap.

You can read a burgeoning thread at the official EVE Online community forums for more details.

UPDATE #1 (1:40 EST Thursday December 6)-

A member of the EVE Online Development Team just forwarded the following message to all players:

“We are aware of the problems with the boot.ini file, please read the top topic in the general discussion forum for information.”

A new support thread is online offering further information.

UPDATE #2 (2:05 EST Thursday December 6)-

The exact offending code, which is plainly visible during the patch process, is as follows:

Output Folder: C:\…\Eve\Tranquility\
Delete File: \boot.ini
Extract: boot.ini

Those with even the most basic coding experience should see the issue here instantly.

Related Stories

Comments

2 Responses to “New EVE Online Patch Leaves Windows XP Nonfunctional”

  1. Timethian on December 7th, 2007 2:16 am

    It should be noted, and seems to be relatively ignored by those screaming about this, that XP instances where EVE was installed on any other drive or partition than the root drive did not experience the deletion.

  2. bob on December 13th, 2007 12:48 pm

    Who cares if others did not experience the problem. This is a HUGE issue and the “screaming” is justified. So stop being a FanBoy and recognize that this sucked for those that were victums of careless if not negligent devs.

Leave a Reply