Legal action against star force.

[ronson49]

Hi there,

After recently installing a game with SF4, it was responsible for failure of my PC components. More importantly the hard drive lost a partition along with hundreds of hours of development work from the last 3 months.

I basically lost my entire porfolio due to it.

Normally id have just stopped using starforce protected games, but the fact is my chances of gaining entry to uni this year are very very slim without a portfolio and considering i have an interview in 3 weeks..... you know? I have nothing.

So since my life no longer has no real outlook i want to take legal action on either starforce or Midway.

However i do not know who to target.

All i know that i bought a midway game and apart from there being no clear warning i was about to install the MALWARE, there was surley deffinatly no warning that if i installed this game from the original CD i was at risk from phenomenal data loss.

It is like buying a product for your house that malfunctions and burns your house to the ground.... its not acceptable at all.

Who is the culprit therefor? Starforce is obviously what caused the issue, but for legal actions do they hide behind the publisher and should it be midway that is to blame?

It may sound a bit farfetched, but seriously.... i may not be able to goto uni any more and considering i have handed in notice to my job and put a contract down for a 52 week rent lease in a different city, this incident has practially derailed my life. My work is top notch and would have guarenteed me a place yet for the sake of BUYING AND INSTALLING A GAME its fucked me over.



Thanks.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Please, don't get me wrong as I'm against Starforce, too... However, if you look at it from their lawyers' point of view, then there are two very important things:

1. You cannot prove, without any doubt, that the reason for your data loss is Starforce. So, you cannot win the legal suit.

2. You should've kept backing up your data all the time, no matter what software you're running. (It is very, very, VERY sad that people only understand this only when they do manage to lose their data...! ) So, you won't get any money to cover your loss of data anyway.

Consequently, there's no point in starting legal action against Starforce as they will either laugh at you (best case) or counter-sue you (worst case).

[Edit] By the way, an old friend of mine had a similar case. A Starforce-protected game messed up the partition table and the boot sector and part of the first FAT on the first partition. After a few hours, with manual editing and with fsck.vfat's help, almost all data was recovered: not only the OS booted up but also his very precious music samples (for his pop group) remained unharmed. You might want to make an appointment at a data salvage company...

[Grumpy]

@ronson49
Providing you havent installed anything (or written) to the drive you could try a program called 'R-Studio' to recover your lost data. You would need a spare hardrive to copy the lost data to and the spare hardrive needs to be approx 3 times the size of the one you are recovering data from. This is because R-Studio will recover data you thought you had deleted from many months ago!
It may sound like a long shot but it has worked for me and many of my friends. Not that my problem was caused by starforce and I doubt it was the cause of my friends problems. Give it a try, you have nothing to lose and by the sounds of things, plenty to gain.

Unfortunately for you I also agree with what Joe has said about proving it was starforce which has caused the problem. And I am definately not a supporter of starforce!

[ronson49]

I aint touched the partition since so ill try your advice.

The thing is, i am very comfy with my PC in terms of knowledge. I never have any issues with my PC coz i make sure its kept topnotch. That is why i have never seen anything like this.

Powered on the PC, fine, installed the game from the store, fine, asked to reboot fine, on reboot, no D:/ partition, and my computer no longer restarts. If i goto shutdown or restart or log off, the system hangs much like a blue screen but with no warning. I can never again have a decent reboot because i have to cold power off my system at all times.

I appreciate backup is my issue, however lets not back away from the fact that i an not obliged to back up my data every week. I may have lost my data, however the cause of it was a commercial product.

It is very much like having a kitchen fire caused by a washing machine you purchased, to say it does not matter because i have no house insurance is 2 seperate things. I may never get the data back but that does not mean i cannot claim damages against the washing machine company whos faulty product caused the whole situation in the first place.

Im so confident of my claims that as soon as i try to get my data back i will clean format my drive and reinstall all MS updates. Then i will install that game and i know i will have the same problem again.

thanks for the help u 2

[DABhand]

Also partition magic may recover your partition table.

[Luciel]

if its that important dont risk anything with trying other software, just make an appointment with some sort of data retrieval company, also, if ur so confident, starforce over 5000 dollars to whoever that can take their pc to them and replicate the problem to proove its starforce, and no one has so far.

[Joe Forster/STA]

Please, note that you don't get insurance for your data. If you have a house/flat/life insurance that includes insurance for your properties, as well, then you won't get any money for data loss, only for your computer's hardware, if it breaks. You can get insurance for your data but, believe me, you can't earn enough money to pay that insurance!

You're right, you're not obliged to back up your data every week. However, in that case, such very unfortunate data losses can - and, according to Murphy, will - occur once. Actually, I'm not backing up my data every week either; I back it up daily and, when being very busy, sometimes hourly or even more often. (Why the fuck would I want to redo even an hour's worth of work, especially, when I'm in a hurry?!)

[ronson49]

5000 notes to who can replicate the problem?

Today i installed windows XP pro with sp1, same as always i created 2 partitions from 1 drive. C:/ and D:/ Windows is 1 D:/s for other stuff.

The only thing prior to installing my friends copy of R&F:Civ on the clean reinstall was all the microsoft updates available to my computer.

I installed R&F, restarted, no D:/ partiton, not there was anything on it, but to my windows system there is no longer a D:/ drive AND THE EXACT same problem with regards to restarting. It does not restart after installing spyforce for the first time.

I could do this over and over and prove anyone,

To the person who said theres 5000 notes in it, i think you have been watching too much TV. I posted in the technical support section, they were only too happy to help until today when i redone the entire problem. Now my posts are being deleted as soon as they are seen by a mod with no reasons why.

Backing up for PC every hour is kind of like polishing each physical surface before you place your hand on it, totally pointless in my view. The chances of hard drive failures are exceedingly slim. I have seen few hard drive faults since i worked in a family shop while i was 15 to this day now where im 24. I have seen 2 cases yet hundreds or thousands of PCs.

The whole issue is not about anything other than i got a game, if the game is going to fiddle around with the insides of my operating system and causes problems other than just be a form of entertainment then someone must be responsible for it. Regardless of who it is, someone has the responsibility for putting an unfinished damage causing software bundle in with a game i purchased.

It does not matter how big the challenge is, the software is directly responsible for undesired behaviour and there is no clear warning that the software is able to do this. Since i pay for it, i have consumer rights just like anyone else.


star-force.com forum PM

"I think the two topics you created are deleted because they consider it as spam.
Nerva said in the locked topic that if you need help you could use the mailing support.
[email protected]"

and the reason he now says that is because it does not look good on a public forum, a repeat of the same thing. It does my head in

[Grumpy]

@ronson49

To the person who said theres 5000 notes in it, i think you have been watching too much TV.

That person is a moderator here at fileforums and is quite correct in what he says!!
If you ever read something, which you believe is not correct, you should always educate yourself on the subject first before you shoot your mouth off!
You can read all about the $10 000 offered for any proof of damages from starforce here!
Note: Unfortunately for you the offer expired on January 31 2006.

Good Luck with that law suit!

[Luciel]

Originally Posted by Grumpy

@ronson49

That person is a moderator here at fileforums and is quite correct in what he says!!
If you ever read something, which you believe is not correct, you should always educate yourself on the subject first before you shoot your mouth off!
You can read all about the $10 000 offered for any proof of damages from starforce here!
Note: Unfortunately for you the offer expired on January 31 2006.

Good Luck with that law suit!

Yup, ditto.

[Joe Forster/STA]

If you really can reproduce those problems with Starforce, damn, we're all with you; give 'em hell, tiger!

As for the necessity of making backups, I wasn't talking about hardware failure as - you're right - it's not very common - IF you buy quality components for your computer, that is! -; I was rather talking about software fucking it up intentionally (virus or other kinds of malware) or unintentationally (like in your, also very unfortunate, case). I insist: yes, making backups is very important! I understand that backing up your stuff often can be a pain in the ass. However, in that case, find an automized backup system so that you reduce manual work as much as possible...