CTD at startup

[adoiad]

Welp folks, it's that time again where skyrim has stopped working for seemingly no reason. I was playing just last night with no issues and all of a sudden this morning I'm crashing at startup right when the drums start and just before the bethesda logo. I didn't add or remove anything, I closed my game last night and when I went to boot it up this morning it ctds. I launched skyrim through the steam launcher rather than skse to see what would happen and I get a disk write error at appmanifest_489830.acf which is obviously skyrim se appmanifest. My SSD that sse is on his healthy and functioning, I started fallout 4 just now which is on the same SSD and it works. As I said this changed over night with no edits to anything and no mods added or removed. I'll post both my appmanifest for FO4 and SSE down below for cross reference maybe as I said they are both on the same disk, fo4 works sse does not.

 

appmanifest_377160.acf appmanifest_489830.acf

[CaptainJ03]

44 minutes ago, adoiad said:

I launched skyrim through the steam launcher rather than skse to see what would happen

it crashes. Now go back to using the SKSE launcher as it says in the manual. You wouldn't boot your current machine from a Win95 floppy disc and expect things to run smoothly...

[adoiad]

1 minute ago, CaptainJ03 said:

it crashes. Now go back to using the SKSE launcher as it says in the manual. You wouldn't boot your current machine from a Win95 floppy disc and expect things to run smoothly...

I do run it from skse usuaully guy, It's called trouble shooting. Steam sse typically launches fine however now it is not. Condescending comments telling me something super obvious like to run through skse really aren't helpful. 

[traison]

1 hour ago, adoiad said:

I get a disk write error at appmanifest_489830.acf

 

The way storage devices are made writes will never fail unless there's a severe hardware failure. Reads are a different matter. If we assume this is an actual disk write error and you haven't noticed the symptoms yet or its unusually benign or in early stages:

1. Start.
2. Search for "eventvwr.msc".
3. Ctrl + Shift + Enter to run it elevated.
4. Inspect the system log for disk write errors. Make sure these are dealth with before proceeding with debugging Skyrim. Edit: If you find one, replace the disk if it contains valuable data. If not replaced, assume its going to be dead within a month of the first report.

 

Assuming your disk is fine and Steam is just trying to bulls*** you. Get a crash logger.

Edited June 14, 2024 by traison

[Grey Cloud]

43 minutes ago, adoiad said:

Condescending comments telling me something super obvious like to run through skse really aren't helpful. 

Neither are your snotty replies. You are the one posting two problems within a couple of days.

 

1 hour ago, adoiad said:

My SSD that sse is on his healthy and functioning, I started fallout 4 just now which is on the same SSD and it works.

That doesn't mean that there are no bad sectors where Skyrim is installed.

[adoiad]

3 hours ago, traison said:

1. Start.
2. Search for "eventvwr.msc".
3. Ctrl + Shift + Enter to run it elevated.
4. Inspect the system log for disk write errors. Make sure these are dealth with before proceeding with debugging Skyrim. Edit: If you find one, replace the disk if it contains valuable data. If not replaced, assume its going to be dead within a month of the first report.

 

Assuming your disk is fine and Steam is just trying to bulls*** you. Get a crash logger.

Okay I did like you said and looked through all events since yesterday when skyrim was working, I didn't see anything related to a disk write error. It does seem like it's within steam/skyrim itself. I would just simply re-install but I'd like to avoid that because I'm not playing the current version rn and don't want to mess up my mods and .dlls.

 

Also I attempted to install the crash logger twice before and it was for some reason incompatible with something else I had and I was unable to launch skyrim with it, I believe it was .NET Script Framework 

Edited June 14, 2024 by adoiad

[adoiad]

2 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Neither are your snotty replies. You are the one posting two problems within a couple of days.

 

What does me posting twice have to do with anything? If my response is snotty it's because I don't appreciate people commenting on my topic for assistance with arrogant, snide replies. I will admit I didn't describe my post the greatest as I had somewhere to be this morning and was in a bit of a hurry and that's my bad. I always launch skyrim thru skse and that is where my ctds occurred, I then launched thru steam to see the outcome and that is where I received the disk write error. In other words, skse launches and ctds during launch, steam fails to launch altogether alongside a disk write error. I didn't elaborate quite well enough and for that I apologize. However the first guy obviously came at me condescending and unhelpful. If you don't have any valuable advice or are just looking to irritate me, please just don't bother commenting. It didn't bother me that they weren't any help rather that they clearly only came here for the purpose of being snarky and that's just annoying.

[traison]

43 minutes ago, adoiad said:

I believe it was .NET Script Framework

 

It has its own crash logger. Need to disable that first.

 

Can't do anything about the crashing until I see a crash log, or get access to your computer. I have a feeling you'd rather opt for #1.

[Grey Cloud]

38 minutes ago, adoiad said:

What does me posting twice have to do with anything?

Other than you are the one with the problems?

[adoiad]

29 minutes ago, traison said:

It has its own crash logger. Need to disable that first.

 

Can't do anything about the crashing until I see a crash log, or get access to your computer. I have a feeling you'd rather opt for #1.

Alright I just installed the crash logger. I did see I had a bunch of old crash logs in my Documents/SkyrimSE/SKSE but I don't know if they were from another crash log or not. I now have the one you linked but the logs aren't being made for some reason.

[pinky6225]

Feel the appmanifest thing is a red herring tbh, did you set it to read only to prevent unwanted steam updates? since while i've never tried running it via steam while also set to read only maybe that is a cause

 

Usually crashes at the beth logo are signs of a missing master and while i understand from your post you haven't added/changed anything feel the best route forward would be loading up tes5edit with everything selected and making sure it isn't something simple like a missing/de-activated master (for a unknown reason)

[adoiad]

10 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Other than you are the one with the problems?

Yes, other than yet another obvious and pointless remark. Now you can kindly leave and stop commenting, I have better things to do than quip back and forth with you and I'd hope you do too. 

[traison]

6 minutes ago, adoiad said:

Alright I just installed the crash logger. I did see I had a bunch of old crash logs in my Documents/SkyrimSE/SKSE but I don't know if they were from another crash log or not. I now have the one you linked but the logs aren't being made for some reason.

 

I can work with the logs from .NetScriptFramwork. It just has a habit of unwinding the callstack incorrectly so reliability might be a bit more hit-n-miss than usual. If you have several logs you know are from this specific issue, consider uplading 2-3 of them.

[adoiad]

2 minutes ago, pinky6225 said:

did you set it to read only to prevent unwanted steam updates?

I did just this morning as skyrim suddenly decided to auto update itself after I encountered the ctd. So I can rule that out, whether it is read only or not, skse still crashes and steam still gives disk write error. 

 

5 minutes ago, pinky6225 said:

Usually crashes at the beth logo are signs of a missing master

That was also something I immediately thought of but I don't even have a way to disable them on vortex and they don't show on my dlc on steam, only AE content has ever showed. There's also no plugin browser on my launcher to see if the dlc is checked. I'll take your advice and look in sseedit, that's actually really good, I didn't think of that yet.

[adoiad]

I looked in SSEedit and my masters are still enabled. Now I'm just trying to get the crash logger to actually log, for whatever reason the default output directory isn't showing anything.

[traison]

13 minutes ago, adoiad said:

I looked in SSEedit and my masters are still enabled. Now I'm just trying to get the crash logger to actually log, for whatever reason the default output directory isn't showing anything.

 

it is possible what you're seeing is not a crash caused by an unhandled exception. Its possible one of the existing handlers handled the exception and decided to terminate the application. In this situation you'd need a debugger with the capability to intercept handled exceptions to find out what's going on. This gets considerably more difficult unless you're already familiar with debuggers.

[adoiad]

11 minutes ago, traison said:

it is possible what you're seeing is not a crash caused by an unhandled exception.

Yeah it isn't really a traditional crash and because of the disk write error and the fact I can't even get to the point of the bethesda logo showing it might be why I can't get a crash log. I don't like it but the only thing that I think would work at this point is to update/reinstall skyrim and hope everything works. I can't even begin to consider diving into a debugger. I'll poke around a bit more and if nothing jumps out at me I might just have to update. Thanks for the input anyway, I kind of figured I was overdue for skyrim to throw me a curve ball and stop working out of the blue like happens once a year or so.

[traison]

The write error you can most likely solve with ProcMon from Sysinternals (Microsoft). Its a tool that takes some getting used to if you're not familiar with the inner workings of Windows, but it will tell you why Steam is unhappy.

[adoiad]

I just got this this warning in vortex which is associated with a main esm

Spoiler

Error: "dragonborn.esm" is not a valid plugin
    at l.handleResponse (C:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex\resources\app.asar.unpacked\bundledPlugins\gamebryo-plugin-management\index.js:2:618748)
    at C:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex\resources\app.asar.unpacked\bundledPlugins\gamebryo-plugin-management\index.js:2:617237
    at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
    at Socket.<anonymous> (C:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex\resources\app.asar.unpacked\bundledPlugins\gamebryo-plugin-management\index.js:2:617220)
    at Socket.emit (node:events:517:28)
    at addChunk (node:internal/streams/readable:335:12)
    at readableAddChunk (node:internal/streams/readable:308:9)
    at Readable.push (node:internal/streams/readable:245:10)
    at Pipe.onStreamRead (node:internal/stream_base_commons:190:23)

 

Logfile.PML

 

Shit and I tried to uplaod my ProcMon log but it was nearly 3 gb and literally failed upload right at the end.

 

Edited June 15, 2024 by adoiad

[Roarc]

21 hours ago, adoiad said:

I did just this morning as skyrim suddenly decided to auto update itself after I encountered the ctd. So I can rule that out, whether it is read only or not, skse still crashes and steam still gives disk write error. 

 

If steam was in the process of updating and you canceled, it might have just corrupted your game files. So I'd suggest just doing the depot method to grab the files for the version of Skyrim that you had originally. Setting the app manifest to read only only works before it tries to update unfortunately, not after.

 

[adoiad]

11 minutes ago, Roarc said:

If steam was in the process of updating and you canceled, it might have just corrupted your game files. So I'd suggest just doing the depot method to grab the files for the version of Skyrim that you had originally. Setting the app manifest to read only only works before it tries to update unfortunately, not after.

I did that yesterday and I get the same ctd. I installed the update and then downloaded the appmanifest from the previous build and overwrote it. Same exact result as yesterday.

 

I just purged my mods on vortex and the game loads so it definitely looks to be mod related now, it just sucks because I have 254 plugins and 427 light.

Edited June 15, 2024 by adoiad

[Roarc]

20 minutes ago, adoiad said:

I did that yesterday and I get the same ctd. I installed the update and then downloaded the appmanifest from the previous build and overwrote it. Same exact result as yesterday.

 

I just purged my mods on vortex and the game loads so it definitely looks to be mod related now, it just sucks because I have 254 plugins and 427 light.

The actual plugin limit number gets thrown around a lot, but I believe it's 253. 1 slot for saves, and one slot for all the ESL plugins, but anyone else feel free to correct me there. If it's mod-related now, grab a crash log using Crash logger SSE and post it here.

If it's still not generating however, then that's a different story.

Edited June 15, 2024 by Roarc

[adoiad]

I definitely had a crash logger working in the past because I saw a bunch of old crash logs in my documents. The one I downloaded yesterday just isn't logging for whatever reason but I'll see about getting some sort of crash log.

 

[Roarc]

You're on 1.5.97 I'm guessing, due to the fact you had .NET Script? I suppose you can try to ensure you have updated VC Redistributables:

Latest supported Visual C++ Redistributable downloads | Microsoft Learn

And ensure you've disabled NET Script Framework or removed it temporarily for the time being. If both fail, I suppose Trainwreck is your only option if neither NET Script and Crash Logger SSE don't generate anything.

I don't usually recommend it since it's less informative than the previous two, but at the very least having a log might show SOMETHING.

Trainwreck - A Crash Logger at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)

Remember to only have 1 logger active at a time, so enable and disable as needed.

Edited June 15, 2024 by Roarc

[traison]

1 hour ago, adoiad said:

I tried to uplaod my ProcMon log

 

Bad idea. They contain a lot of information. Far, far more than what you might expect.

 

38 minutes ago, Roarc said:

The actual plugin limit number gets thrown around a lot, but I believe it's 253.

 

Form ids go from 0x00 to 0xFF. Skyrim.esm hogs 0x00, references like to live in 0xFF and light plugins are in 0xFE. Meaning the total number of addressable (non-light) plugins is 253 like you said. I believe the reason why the plugin limit seems to vary depending on who you ask is twofold: because light mods were added recently, and because of the stdio limit imposed by the C framework upon which the game is built. By default that limit is 512, but Engine Fixes SSE quadruples it.

 

The stdio limit is basically how many file handles a process can hold at any given moment. It seems the game is keeping a handle to all plugins and bsa files at least (not checked). In addition to this all lose files will be causing their own traffic as well, all those textures and meshes need to be opened to be loaded. In the sense of "where you're at in regards to the stdio limit" is practically impossible to tell from a plugin or mod list. The closest you might get to estimating that is with "handles" from Sysinternals (Microsoft); and this you'd have to run at various points in the game and average out the values you're getting.

Edited June 15, 2024 by traison