Setting Program/etc files to Read-Only...

[Strangel]

Yeah.. I know.. great idea.

My questions are.. do I set it from "EA Games" as Read-Only on all levels, subfolders, and files? And.. how the hell do you do a "read-only mounting"?

[angelyne]

What exactly are you hoping to achieve by doing this?

[morriganrant]

What exactly are you hoping to achieve by doing this?

Well, my guess is that Strangel wants to ensure that core files will not go corrupt by some shoddy hack or such.

[Strangel]

Mmhmm. I had to reinstall Seasons recently, lost my Plantsim skins.. narrowed it down to a problem in TSData, went hunting for old threads to see if O'Mighty listed somewhere which folders to set read-only, found one where he mentions "read-only mounting".

[J. M. Pescado]

If you install the game to a seperate partition which is then mounted read-only, it is impossible for the game to attempt to edit those files.

[Strangel]

Nyaha. Thanks, O'Mighty. After dumping LS pulled walls & floors into the Bins folder and setting it to read-only with the rest, said files aren't showing in the catalog. Am I missing something that should have been saved and moved over as well?

[Fubuki]

What exactly does "separate partition" mean? I'm not familiar with the term "mount" either. I just set everything in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES as read-only. Is that the wrong way to do it?

[Strangel]

What exactly does "separate partition" mean? I'm not familiar with the term "mount" either. I just set everything in C:\Program Files\EA GAMES as read-only. Is that the wrong way to do it?

If you only have ONE partition, you're running off Admin. If you have multiple "Users" you can choose from when booting up Windows, you've got partitions. I'm not sure how to trun sims from one partition to another, but setting everything read-only in C: Program EA is working for me.

....oh and I am phail. Stupid walls and floors appeared on the next reboot.

[ScoobyDoo]

I think you mean accounts not partitions, partitions are how you can divide up a hard drive's storage space. (aka drives).

[morriganrant]

Indeed, I have several accounts on this PC, all of them are on one partition. The other is where my OS is.

[seelindarun]

There's more than one way to set the program files to read-only.  The method suggested by JMP

If you install the game to a seperate partition which is then mounted read-only, it is impossible for the game to attempt to edit those files.

does require a separate disk partition which you'd have to explicitly mount as read-only before launching the game.  This isn't the same method as running from a crippled user account, which is on the same partition.  I have no experience with the fallibility of this latter method; it may depend on your OS.  Naturally, JMPs method is bullet-proof to any OS.