User:Pmw57/Minecrafthelp/Troubleshooting

= Troubleshooting guide = This guide provides some common issues that people may have when trying to play Minecraft, and solutions that they can use to fix such problems.

If you require further assistance with fixing your computer, please feel free to come along to the IRC channel called #minecrafthelp on esper.net, using an IRC client such as mIRC, xChat, or by using esper.net's web access to #minecrafthelp

No accelerated OpenGL mode
Problem

You try to run Minecraft and it says: Minecraft was unable to start because it failed to find an accelerated OpenGL mode.

Cause

The video card drivers may be out of date.

Solution

Update your video card drivers

Problematic frame or pixel format not accelerated
Problem

The Minecraft launcher won't start and a file called hs_err_pid.log is created that mentions a problematic frame, or Java tell you that you have bad video card drivers due to pixel format not accelerated.

Cause

The above reports about problematic frame or pixel format not accelerated are caused by having out of date or bad video card drivers, which result in the graphics card not knowing how to handle certain OpenGL commands.

Commonly this is due to the graphics card being too old.

Solution

Update your video card drivers

Graphics driver update isn't effective
If your graphics card has less than 1 Gig of memory you may have to use a different graphics card. Minecraft has some minimum hardware requirements, among which are 1GB of graphics card memory.

You can still try to update your graphics card drivers from other sources though, if standard updates for your existing video card drivers aren't proving to be effective.


 * 1) Find out the name of your graphics card by running dxdiag (howto) and going to the Display tab.
 * 2) Once you know the name of your graphics card and its current version, you can then perform a web search for updated display drivers for it, by using a search parameter such as: "RADEON 9200 SE" driver update
 * 3) Look through the results for drivers with a more recent version for you to download and install. Be prepared to accept though that older graphics cards won't have more recent drivers.

Can't connect to minecraft.net, with the lower part of the launcher having a black background
Problem

Cannot connect to minecraft.net when attempting to log in via the launcher, and the login section at the lower part of the launcher has a black background, instead of the normal dirt background.

A sample java error report for the problem is shown at http://pastebin.com/Mi2wrnvM

Cause

When you run a command prompt, you will see that the directory name for your account contains special characters in it. For example:

C:\Users\Mine!>

Having special characters in your windows username, or an exclamation mark at the end, breaks Java's ability to work with files needed for Minecraft.

This cannot be fixed by renaming your account username because the folder name for your windows account still remains with the same problem.

Solution

There are a couple of solutions that can be applied.

Solution 1: Create a new user account without special characters

You can create a new user account, so that special characters are no longer in the directory name for your user. Just renaming your account doesn't change the directory name. After creating the new user account without any special characters, you can rename your user account to have them.

Solution 2: Tell Minecraft to place the data files somewhere else

Another solution is to set the APPDATA location to somewhere else for the game.

You can do this with a batch file that changes the APPDATA location, and place the batch file along with minecraft.exe in a location that is outside of your user area: @echo off set APPDATA=. minecraft.exe  Solution 3: Or you can run this profile fix file which creates a similar batch file, and places a shortcut to it on the desktop for you. Download it and run it with administrator permissions.

Connection to minecraft.net fails, with HTML text up in the news panel
Problem

Cannot connect to minecraft.net when attempting to log in via the launcher, and HTML content appears in the news panel, for example:

&lt;html&gt;&lt;body&gt;&lt;font color="#808080"&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;center&gt;Failed to update news&lt;br&gt; java.net.someKindOfException: An error message of some kind here&lt;/center&gt;&lt/font&gt;&lt;/body&gt;&lt;/html&gt;

Cause

Java 7 is having trouble using IPv6 to communicate with minecraft.net

Solution

Tell Java 7 to prefer to use IPv4 instead of IPv6.

This can be achieved by creating a shortcut to the minecraft.exe launcher with those preferred settings:

PC instructions:

java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false -jar minecraft.exe
 * 1) Right-click on minecraft.exe and select "Create shortcut"
 * 2) Rename the shortcut if you wish to something else, such as "Minecraft with IPv4"
 * 3) Right-click on the shortcut and select properties
 * 4) In the Target field, replace the text with:

Press OK to finish, and try out the updated shortcut

Update unable to complete
Problem

When the launcher tries to update, the update isn't able to finish.

Cause

The reason why the update isn't able to finish is that the attempt to download the updated files is being blocked. This is most commonly due to an antivirus program mistakenly blocking some of the files, such as lwjgl.dll or other files.

Solution

Temporarily disable your antivirus program and perform a forced update.

org.lwjgl.LWJGLException: Could not create context
Problem

When the launcher tries to run Minecraft, you get a crash report that says:

org.lwjgl.LWJGLException: Could not create context at org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsContextImplementation.nCreate(Native Method) at org.lwjgl.opengl.WindowsContextImplementation.create(WindowsContextImplementation.java:50) at org.lwjgl.opengl.Context. (Context.java:120) at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:858) at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:784) at org.lwjgl.opengl.Display.create(Display.java:765) at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.a(SourceFile:236) at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.run(SourceFile:657) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

Cause

The reason why Minecraft cannot start is that some of its files haven't been downloaded. This is most commonly due to an antivirus program mistakenly blocking some of the files, such as lwjgl.dll or other files.

Solution

Temporarily disable your antivirus program and perform a forced update.

UnknownHostException: session.minecraft.net
Problem

You can login to Minecraft but when you try to connect to a multiplayer server, you get an error about session.minecraft.net that says:

Internal client error: java.net.UnknownHostException: session.minecraft.net

Sample image: http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/3708/srrorh.jpg

Also, when you try to ping session.minecraft.net, you won't get a response from it. You may see something like:

C:\Users\YourUserName>ping session.minecraft.net Ping request could not find host session.minecraft.net. Please check the name and try again.

Cause

The session.minecraft.net domain is either down, or has changed and your existing DNS server still points to the wrong place.

Solution

You can change the DNS server from your ISP's default one to a different one, and try again. Instructions on how to change your DNS server can be found at the page on DNS Addressing - How to Change in Windows 7