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Hi,

I finished installing HL2 about 4 hours ago and still haven't managed to get it working correctly. When I click on Half-Life 2 in Steam I get the "Preparing the play Half-Life 2" dialog which disappears after around 20 secs and the cd drive makes a noise like it has begun playing the disk.. and then, nothing. I get no errors, nothing - it just doesn't load. However, it has managed to load once before and I managed to play, but have not been able to do it again for the last few hours. My specs are as follows.

AMD Athlon 64 3400+
512MB RAM
Radeon Mobility 9700 128MB

I have tried updating drivers and such for the radeon without any luck.

Right now, I'm out of ideas.

Any suggestions?

Yeah, i spent 40 quid using my bluetooth mobile to download all the annoying steam stuff, cos i can't connect to the net from uni properly, and i'm having the exact same problem.

it says- loading half life 2, then nothing.
no errors, doesn't even spin the cd.

We seriously need some help here.

AMD athlon xp 2400+
Connect 3D Radeon 9600 Series 128m
1 Gig Of Ram

could be the Radeons... hmmm

Have you searched on Google? I get alot of answers there.

Yeah, tried looking on google for hours, unfortunately it's kinda hard to find any information when there's not even an error message or any kind of identifiable problem.

Even worse, all i can find on google is pages and pages of people telling me how good HL2 is, haha.

This MUST be a reasonably common problem, surely?

It doesn't appear to be common at all -- and even if it is using google seems futile right now for an error with no error message.

Jam_sponge, could you give me some more detailed specifications of your machine perhaps we can identify a common piece of hardware which may be causing the problem.

Not entirely sure what else to list.
Obviously it's not a very common problem, i'm just assuming more than 2 people in the world have experienced this, hehe.

well, it's a 2,00mhz processor,
using windows XP, all updates
Nvidia N-force2 onboard sound and the rest
A347SCSI SCSI Controller

anything else you want listed, let me know.
I'm using steam in offline mode btw, so i didn't think net conn. was valid.
although online mode won't work either.

Would you know what chipset you are using?

I had/have the same problem( I havent seen if it's entirely fixed) but I found one solution that might work:

1. Update the firmware for your cd-rom's company's site

2. uninstall and reinstall the drivers for your graphics card and then update them

3. go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and update windows from there

hopefully this will help you out b/c so far the game has started up with no problems BUT before i knew about this solution the game would work once and after I exited it, turned off and booted my computer back up it wouldnt work and right now since it is working i'm too scared to turn my comp off(thats why I don't know if this works fully)

couldn't hurt to try though

If you're wondering my specs are:
AMD 64 3000+
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Asus K8V mobo
Lite-On DVD/CDRW combo CDrom
no sound card
160GB Maxtor HD
1 GB of RAM

Nevermind...I turned off my comp, turned it back on, tried to play and got the "Preparing to play Half life 2..." and nothing happened

back to square one

Did you guys all install and update half life 2 from your own pc with a direct internet conn?

Cos i did a kinda funny technique of copying steam across and then updating via my mobile phone. i don't THINK the copying steam across caused a problem, but it might have done.

I did delete the registry.blog file thing, just to check if that was the case, and then it sorted itself out again for my pc, but still no avail.
i can't even get it to run first time! haha
I've even tried closing down all other background programs, nothing.

it's all rather random.

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 1 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer eveshamvale
System Model AWRDACPI
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 6 Model 8 Stepping 1 AuthenticAMD ~2004 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Phoenix Technologies, LTD 6.00 PG, 03/10/2003
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\System32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United Kingdom
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920)"
Time Zone GMT Standard Time
Total Physical Memory 1,024.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 609.23 MB
Total Virtual Memory 3.40 GB
Available Virtual Memory 2.69 GB
Page File Space 2.40 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

Right, there's all the system info on one page.

Mine doesn't even seem to check the CD drive when it says it's starting HL2,
but i'm assuming it's nothing to do with the CD drive, as otherwise it would just ask for the disc, i guess...

I installed it with a direct internet connection. Apart from us all having an AMD processor and a Radeon 9X00 card, I can't see any other connection.

I've been uninstalling/reinstalling cdrom drives/updating drivers/reinstalling original drivers for almost everything. Apart from formatting now, I'm really stuck for options.

Has anyone looked in the event viewer under applications to see if there are any errors there?

Regards Howard

Nothing there.

I`ve just found this info don`t know if it will help or not.

November 19, 2004, 11:03 pm · valve
A small number of Half-Life 2 customers have been experiencing problems while playing the game, and we have traced these issues to corrupt Steam cache files. We've released a Steam update to help resolve these issues. If you have been experiencing problems such as crashing during gameplay or startup of Half-Life 2, please restart Steam and then click on one of the links below. Steam will then automatically verify your cache files. The verification process will take roughly five minutes to complete.

http://www.steampowered.com/?area=news

Regards Howard

No luck with that either. Thanks for suggesting anyways.

It bothers me that I've had it running once before also, else I probably would have been formatting/given up at this point.

Does anyone with this problem have McAfee firewall installed?

nope, i do have some virus scanning software, but i've tried switching it all off, and it's no different.

ok, seems like this problem has been put to the side, so to speak.
is it just that everyone has given up? or have you all fixed it and gone off to play HL2, haha. (i notice the first guy to post hasn't been back, so maybe he's sorted it, hehe)

Just to add to the confusion.

I'm running:
P4 2.8GHz
Intel 875 M/B
1GB Ram
Geforce FX 5600
Benq DVD Re-writer

And have exactly the same problem as you all, HL2 fails to load, comes up with the preparing to load HL2, spins up the DVD, then nothing!!

I've updated to XP SP2 no other critical updates are available, DX 9.0c, the latest Nvidia drivers, I've flashed my DVD burner, and it still doesn't load.

I tried checking the cache files as well that Howard suggested, and still nothing!

I've now uninstalled HL2 and Steam, and will try and reinstall it later.