Hello. I made an account here to see if anybody else has had trouble with 7th Heaven going terribly wrong. Please bear with me through this explanation because there are a lot of problems happening at once and it's hard to tell which piece of information is the most salient.
I installed 7th Heaven a long time ago and it worked fine. I played through most of the game with several mods, running fine. Updated 7th Heaven to latest version, worked fine.
Then, perhaps triggered by a windows update, 7th Heaven started giving me an error code 5. I fixed that with info I found on this forum, by running 7th Heaven as administrator and running the game exe in 640x480 compatibility mode. But once that was fixed, attempting to launch the game through 7th Heaven results in the Please Insert Disc message box, so the game won't run.
Since I first set up mods, my drive order has changed, and my mounted disk image is on a different letter. I used windows disk management to change the drives back to the old order, so the disk image is on the same letter as it is in the FF7_GC.log. But I still give the same message. Next I tried running the FF7_GameConverter_7H.exe again, but nothing happens. It crashes immediately after opening. I don't even see the command window. So I can't reset my setup by running the converter again. I tested the current and older versions of the converter I found on the site, and ran it from different locations, but it always crashes.
Next I tried erasing the FF7 registry values, and that made no difference.
At this point, I gave up on continuing the game with mods and ran the vanilla game. The vanilla game runs fine, but that's when I discovered a more exciting issue: All of the save files that I created while using 7th Heaven are gone. I still have some save games, but they're very old ones from before I switched to the mod launcher. In the game install folder, in the save folder, there's still a save00.ff7 file, but only the one.
So. If anybody understands what caused this cascade of errors, that would be cool. But, mainly, I'm here to ask: Has anybody else had their saves disappear like this? Do I have any hope of recovering them?