I downloaded Stephanie yesterday. After clicking install, nothing happened except the wait symbol making an appearance. Then I shut down the computer as normal, no problems or indication of problems. When I turned the computer back on about an hour later, it wouldn't come on - blue screen error. After bawling like a baby, screaming and just freaking out I was able to finally get myself together enough to call the computer company. Long story short - I LOST EVERYTHING! I had to reinstall my operating system and will eventually get around to loading in Poser and all my other programs. It will probably take a few days. Of course, I did loose some irreplaceable files, but fortunately not that many since I am somewhat good about backing up my files. Has this happened to anyone else. I see lots of people posted their Stephanie images but I am just downright iffy about loading that devil creature back into my computer, I just don't know if it is worth it!This is the first time that this has ever happened to me and I have used computers personally for about 5 years now (more if you count the jobs that had computers). Has anyone else had problems or had friends that had problems? I'd like to know before I try to load her again, definately iffy about it.

The DAZ install routine takes quite a long time on my machine to search and choose a Poser installation to load to. Other than that (several minutes), Stephanie loaded fine for me. It's possible a corrupted download would have caused you problems, and it's also possible your machine suffered some hiccup coincidentally. A normal install shouldn't kill your operating system, even if it gets interrupted. Did you try booting into safe mode afterward? An OS installation has to be pretty dead to actually require a format and reinstall. In the lack of light of further information, I'm tempted to say your computer company chose a route that was convenient for them, not you. I have several partitions on my hard drive, and there is nothing on the C: drive except Windows and a couple of programs that tie themselves into it too closely (Word, etc). If my OS dies, I don't lose any data. I strongly recommend that nobody keep data on their C: drive.

Thanks for the tip - when I get that 2nd hard drive later this year I will definately set it up that way. Still iffy about Stephanie though. I just read another post where it said there was some problems with the CR2 and that DAZ was supposedly fixing it. Oh well, this will make me question future purchases from DAZ as well.

I agree with PJF - the chances of everything actually being gone are small indeed. A disk that won't boot is one thing, a dead/trashed disk is something else. So your data is (was) there, but you can't (couldn't) get at it. I've had similar things happen many times over the last 15 years of computer fun&games, but never yet actually lost an sigificant number of important files. ('Touch wood' I say to myself and tap my head) One good fix is to get a second harddisk, connect it as temporary master and the bad disk as slave, boot from the healthy disk and access the data on the other, backing it up. Then you can diagnose the bad disk, reinstall Windows without touching the data, etc. There are 50 different other ways to solve probs like these, but the ONE THING YOU MUST NEVER DO is reformat the disk. NEVER! Then you have lost it all, guaranteed! Well, even that can be solved, one can retrieve data from deleted files and formatted disks with the right S/W tools, but it's no fun. Incidentally, I never let the 'wait' thing go on when installing a DAZ file - I cancel it immediately and direct to the Poser directory manually. I have 4 disks with 15 partitions, 260 GigaBytes of data in all, so it takes the install prog up to five minutes (!) to bring back a suggestion for install directory. And that's five minutes too long. My Stephanie install was uneventful, fortunately. :] FishNose

FishNose you sound as bad as me! lol Marque

Every thing work here. No problems. Ron

load stephanie first, before you go through the hassle of everything. but I don't think that stephanie is the culprit (trigger maybe) you've no doubt loaded other daz items (mike 2) without this happening, stephanie should be no different.

If you shut down in the middle of an install, then you hard crashed your computer basically. Sometimes data can be corrupted or lost under those circumstances, but usually not so bad that a Safe Boot won't get you in there to do a bit of cleanup after yourself and get your machine back in working order. Never follow the advice of the Computer manufacturer's tech boys... they ALWAYS will advise you to reinstall it all, since that is the fastest way to get you off the phone, and move on to their next customer, and thus make their quota per day and hold their jobs. I no longer even call them anymore, I do my own tech work, and no longer wind up in your situation. Get yourself Norton Utilities, begin to use it faithfully, to defrag, scandisk, etc and there is a good chance Norton's backups can pull you out of trouble too. I beta tested Stephanie, and have had every version of her down the pike, and she has not even caused my machine to hiccup once, except when I attempted to load in the high res bum files into Poser 4. That was easily resolved though by lowering the resolution of them.

It can be that a virus was running its damaging part while installing Stephanie. Some viruses can erase files on the hard drive while an executable programm is running! Seravajan