Stellaris doesn't start anymore

[jpd]

That the faulting module is reported as ntdll.dll is not surprising. The ntdll module contains the code that manages the memory that's allocated to the heap on behalf of an application. It's detecting a corruption in the system memory areas of the heap whenever the application asks it to allocate/deallocate a chunk of memory from the heap.

However, it's *not* ntdll that is corrupting the heap. Some other part of the system (either the application itself, in this case the Stellaris game, or any of the subsystems that are usesd by the game, which includes directx, drivers, file system, multi media subsystem, etc) has written to an area of memory (which happens to store the heap control data) it had no business writing into. It could have written into other portions of the heap memory. In which case the Windows memory manager would not have detected it, but then some internal game data would have been corrupted. Causing other types of crashes, such as Access Violations. Or weird game behaviour.

In any case, the actual fault is the writing into a piece of memory that should have been off limits. And could have happened minutes earlier before it's actually detected.

In another similar case, it turned out to be a device driver of a piece of hardware that wasn't playing nice.

 

[Dragazhar]

Driver updated. pdx.settings.txt here.. There is no settings.txt in the .../stellaris folder. Not looking in the .../logs folder. Would the lack of that file be an issue?

Game set to Fullscreen. Crash occurs. testing running the Stellaris.exe file not as admin... Same thing, Stellaris window comes up then goes.. and nothing. fresh system.log and error.log from last attempt attacked.

 

[Dragazhar]

The writing to a piece of memory part that @jpd mentions sounds familiar.. I have been having trouble with what I believed was a hard drive problem.. What is the solution to something like that.. ? formatting?

 

[PROACEX1]

My issue keeps returning, I've mainly given up on playing Stellaris. @Dragazhar

 

[AndrewT]

The writing to a piece of memory part that @jpd mentions sounds familiar.. I have been having trouble with what I believed was a hard drive problem.. What is the solution to something like that.. ? formatting?

I think you are conflating system memory with disk space. Both are measured in gigabytes but are otherwise unrelated.

The issue @jpd referred to was purely confined to apps writing to incorrect locations in system memory, nothing to do with disk drives whatsoever.

 

[jpd]

There is a (very) small chance the two can be related. If, and only if, the hard drive malfunction causes data to be read back different to what was initially written due to damage, that area of the hard drive happens to contain the contents of the Windows swap/page file, *and* the damaged data happens to contain those portions of the memory heap that contain the control data structures.

There's probably a better chance to win the lottery

 

[Dragazhar]

I see. I misunderstood. My system has been feeling slower and friends have been saying I need an SSD which I do not have yet so I assumed my issue was my hard drives' oldness. /mope.

@PROACEX1 , I am sorry to hear you still cannot play either. I really love this game and hope I can find a solution to this crash so I can keep playing. I used to play Masters of Orion 1 and 2 and this has been the real successor to those games for me.

I do not want to give up trying to find a solution to this crash.. I am behind in DLC lol and there's a new one out.

 

[jpd]

I see. I misunderstood. My system has been feeling slower and friends have been saying I need an SSD which I do not have yet so I assumed my issue was my hard drives' oldness. /mope.

@PROACEX1 , I am sorry to hear you still cannot play either. I really love this game and hope I can find a solution to this crash so I can keep playing. I used to play Masters of Orion 1 and 2 and this has been the real successor to those games for me.

I do not want to give up trying to find a solution to this crash.. I am behind in DLC lol and there's a new one out.

Hard drives can, and do, fail.

Prior to complete failure, the drive's internal controller attempts to recover data from bad/damaged sectors or tracks by a process known as calibration. In this process, the read/write heads are pulled back all the way to the parking position (usually at the center or the outside of the drive), and then attempt to access the requested sector/track location again. This process of calibration takes time due to the extra head movements, resulting in slower data access overall.

This is precisely why I knew my own hard drive was about to fail about a year ago. The calibrations were increasing over time. My HDD was of the old(er) school, where the movement of the read/write heads could clearly be heard. So the calibration process was easy to recognize.

Bought a new drive, backed up the data of the old one (which took the better part of a day to copy almost 1 TB of data), to find out that some portions of the OS partition (I keep my data in other partitions. The C: drive only contains Windows) were already damaged beyond recovery.

Due to the excessive recalibrations, data reads of application data could take as much as 10 times longer than normal.

 

[Dragazhar]

I have two hard drives. I could switch the installation and see if that changes anything..

 

[PROACEX1]

I still have no luck launching with compatibility or fullscreen/window enhancements disabled.

It's a bit ridiculous at this point. I may reinstall Windows 11 altogether.