The short story - vicious DRM killed my Windows 10.

The long story - I was going through my old physical games to see if there were some that could be thrown out or sold. I got to Psychonauts, russian version in CD jewel, I installed it to check if the game was in English and after installing it the Starforce DRM window popped up. Without suspecting anything I clicked Yes... and it killed my Windows. The following couple of hours were nerve racking as I was jumping from one google/youtube tutorial to another and always hitting a wall. Finally I got to a rational solution - use a second PC to delete Starforce from the harmed disk. I had a spare hdd that I installed windows on and connected my main ssd in hope to remove Starforce, but it was not so easy - first my ssd would not show, then the starforce removal software could not find the installation, until I googled the starforce file names and deleted them by hand. I could not be sure that that would work but luckily it did - my windows loaded like nothing had happened, what a relief! But it was still not over - my storage hdd would not show for some reason, I gues my PC was confused of different disks connected in various order, only after tinkering in bios it started showing again.

So whatever you do, avoid starforce, I learned it the hard way.

Well, I'm glad you managed to resolve the situation and fix your PC. Had it been me, they would have found me on the floor, dead by a heart attack and with my pants stained.

DRMs suck, and the least publishers and developers should do is launch a patch to delete it or at least turn it off once the game isn't sold or supported anymore. I know you used an old copy in physical form, but having a way to deactivate it before all the troubles you've had, would have been great.

I wish you better luck next time you install an old game. And remember, don't click yes if you don't know what can happen!

I know that the PC version of the King Kong game based on the 2005 film had this which sucked since it's pretty good. Seems it's possible to play the PC version without the DRM now though thankfully.

I'm glad you got it fixed. My Win 7 PC recently died after updates to Roblox. It could be that the HDD is done. PC is from 2009, still ran Roblox fine, yet after an update Roblox at first didn't work anymore (fixed after re-installing it 5 times after another update) But now the whole PC is dead. (Was running Roblox, next time I checked it was on the repair windows screen) All I get now is "windows could not boot" run repair, "looking for problems" and that stays up indefinitely. (I let it run for over 24 hours, no change, just a busy animation looking for problems)

I have no clue where to begin, also it's not really worth the time to fix a nearly 14 year old PC. Still sucks as I used it for copying stuff to my external backup drives since it has plenty USB ports and all the different types of card and disc readers build in. I can't install my old PC games anymore :/

Hahaha I assure you I was not far from that, I panicked and was in shock, and even started crying at one point. I could not believe what had happened - a innocent weekend morning turning into a nightmare and all due to a copy protection software from 2005, for a game that I don't even like! I mean like for many people today, PC is not just a machine, it's the central part of life, for better or for worse -_- I would not have lost any important files, I think, but reinstalling the numerous programs that I use and setting them up would be painful and time consuming.

Ugh, if you haven't already, you could try booting Win7 in safe mode and removing the updates.

I'd say the importance of the PC is massively declining. Most young people nowadays don't have a PC or laptop at all and instead use their smartphone for everything - even typical PC stuff like Word.

I doubt there was anyone who didn't own (or at the very least had permanent access to) a PC or laptop when I still attended school.

Well assuming that HDD is also 14 years old, you could easily just buy a new HDD with more space for less money than the old one.

I just built myself a new PC and my previous built was from around 2008. It was still working alright but I needed an upgrade since the GPU couldn't output 4k (which means I could only benefit from the 4k picture of my TV using my Series X) and it was pretty slow when booting and browsing YouTube. I guess not even the CPU would've been able to allow for 4k streaming lol.

I somehow got lucky and only had an experience with Starforce once even though it seems like it was very popular DRM during mid-2000s. This thing is literally a malware which operates on a kernel level. I would advise playing Starforce games under virtual machine or trying to find a Starforce-less version somewhere else. If I'm not mistaken Ubisoft is known to use this DRM for almost all their early 2000s games but they rereleased them all without this crap.

True, but it's not even worth buying the OS again for it, I have no clue where the recovery disks are, if those even still work. (Writable CDs created 14 years ago)

Not to just give up entirely it does allow me to open a command prompt, so it's running chkdsk atm. On the D drive that is, C drive lists nothing :/

Other options are to restore to a previous windows point, yet windows 7 hasn't had any updates in many years, it can't be that?
C drive not working must be the problem, yet where is this repair stuff coming from, X drive.
Odd D drive has the contents of the C drive (it only has one HDD), is it a quirk from system repair to label it as D:

Main problem is, don't have the time to go down this rabbit hole again, nor the patience anymore. If chkdsk doesn't find anything, maybe some other hardware component failed. Guess running memory diagnostic wouldn't hurt either. But can you still buy 14 year old memory sticks. It's a first generation i7 CPU with whatever flavor motherboard and ram chips were 'new' back then.

Edit: Probably the HDD, chkdsk is hanging on 3%, files haven't been counting up in a while, just a blinking cursor, nothing happening. Not good.