>I had my main system drive in RAID striping (no data protection) and sure enough one of the drives went screwy. I had a system backup that I made with Vista Ultimate so I wasn’t that wary of reinstalling. I could pop in the new drive, insert the windows disk and restore, one of the bennefits of Ultimate!

It wasn’t like that, not at all – in order to restore off of one of those Windows Image Backups you need to have the same drive configuration as before. My drives were different – so no go.

I finally reinstalled fresh to a new drive (no RAID on the system drive this time) then I got all the files I needed off the original RAID setup which was still limping along good enough for me to get my data. I was sure I had everything but I was about to find out otherwise.

I started up GTA and it asked me to activate. Ok I can activate, I clicked ok – nada, some error with infrastructure and all that. I realized I needed to reinstall so that got me thinking of my savegames and how I should probably go back them up in case the reinstall tried to overwrite them. I made a backup of my Rockstar Games folder in Documents but as I poked around in there I didn’t see any savegame files. I also didn’t see anything in the new Vista c:\Users\X3\Saved Games folder.

I did some research and realized I had lost them. I needed the files in c:\Users\X3\Local Settings\Application Data\Rockstar Games\... and since I was using XBox Live for Windows and it encrypts the savegames (to prevent people from cheating) I also needed the files in c:\Program Files(x86)\XLive
I’ve lost save games before and I know there are sites around that have a save at virtually every misssion in the game, but how would that work in this case?

After some more searching I found something that would let me load the save files into the reinstalled version:
HowTo for Savegame “wrapper”

Original Site

I’m going to go look for savegame collections now. If I can’t reply my game with all my carefully molded relationsihips I can at least play out the missions and get the rest of the story.

Damn it!

[Update – 2/23/2009] – I found them! I’ll post the link once I get home, but I’ve found a site with all the missions, and the link for the wrapper above works. Now I can get as close as I can to where I left off – of course the relationships, the races, the pidgeons, the stunt jumps, who knows how they did with those but I can only hope for the best and try and finish the game, albeit from someone else’s skin.