More Neighborhood Borkedness

[anachronista]

This may be similar to some other neighborhood problems that have shown up here, but it's beyond me. I wrestled with it for two or three days.

Several months ago I had a hard drive fail on a new computer (fie upon thee, HP!!!  ) and had to replace it. So I backed everything up on a backup drive. We couldn't reinstall Vista on the new drive without having to spend the money for the software, so my beloved computer geek son installed Windows 7 beta on it.

So I reinstall everything onto the new hard drive from the backup drive, reinstall my Sims 2 software, and settle down to play. I start up my game and....WTF! No neighborhoods!  In addition, the game has created an extra EA Games file with nothing but an empty Sims 2 folder in it. Well, I spent a lot of time trying to solve this, swapping files back and forth, sometimes there were no neighborhoods, sometimes there were NEW neighborhoods, sometimes I swapped the whole thing into the empty file, (which to this day is re-created every time I start up the game  ) tried it every which way, but to no avail. For some reason, the reinstalled Sims 2 game refused to read my neighborhoods as they were on the old hard drive.

Finally I found that the last backups of my neighborhoods would work, which is a good compromise compared to not being able to play them at all, but if I could have the borked neighborhoods back, it would be great. 

Anybody else ever seen this sort of thing?  Could it be a SecuRom problem?

[GelatinousSubstance]

I had that problem once, and it was because I forgot to patch the game, I think (the neighbourhoods that weren't showing were previously created and/or saved in a patched game). I don't know if that applies to you, but it's worth a shot if you haven't already considered it.

It also wouldn't hurt to remove SecuROM. In fact, you'd be doing yourself a favour, regardless of whether it's contributing to your problem or not.

[anachronista]

Hi again, GS!

I've installed and reinstalled Sims 2 and all it's EPs and SPs that I have quite a number of times by now what with updating to new machines and adding a laptop and whatnot. I got it down to a routine of installing and then running through all the patches before playing, so the patches were all current before the neighborhoods started being borked. Just for good measure though, I did run the patches again and swapped out a borked neighborhood to see if it worked. It didn't.   So I'm assuming it isn't a patch issue.

But as I said, the disks have been used to install the game quite a few times. Can only guess at the number on it but something like 4 or 5 times on my own machines and then once up to Pets or Seasons on my daughter's machine.   Maybe twice, I dunno... Anyway I'm wondering if that's the problem. Doesn't SecuRom limit the number of times you can run the installation process?

Have been studying the getting-rid-of-Securom thread trying to get up the courage to try it, (damn my technotardness!  ) but unsure how the process will work on Windows 7. One of these days I'll get more sure of myself and give it a whirl. Thanks so much for responding.