Cannot Recover drawing - AutoCAD 2005 file

[CADKitty]

Ok, this has been happening sporadically to drawings in our office - no like person, project, architect, anything as of yet. We'll come in in the morning and try to open a drawing we worked on the day before - comes up corrupt. I go to run a Recover and get the attached log, followed by ACAD freezing and my having to bail. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?

[msjca]

First thought is perhaps it is a hard disk problem?

Hints for difficult dwg recoveries:
try opeing (or even open with recovery but I use open for this) the file but escape escape , etc while it is opening. Mainly to cancel the regen. I have found that sometimes dwgs will repeatedly kick me out of AutoCAD but I can stay in if it does not regen. Then run an audit and purge all. I have had success saving or wblocking * after this. to get the dwg back.

It might help to be use SDI is set and maybe regenauto disabled when trying this.

But maybe there is a server disk problem causing, as suggested above?

[david_peterson]

Just another thought, maybe your AEC Dimension Base (Which I think is it's own .arx file but I could be way off on this) may be corrupt. You could try to replace that. There was another member that couldn't get his drawing to open due to a corrupt .arx file. Once he replace it (and only it) his problems went away. Just an out there thought.

[CADKitty]

Question - would I even have an AEC Dimension Base .arx as I'm not running ADT or the like?

I was actually able to retrieve this particular drawing from the .bak file (thank goodness) but am still disturbed as to why this is happening so randomly. This is the first time one of "my" drawings has done this - it's happening all over the office. All of the drawings are kept on a local server which makes me very nervous...I'd hate for our server to be doing something to the drawings. Hopefully that's just my paranoia kicking in, however...

[Mike.Perry]

Question - would I even have an AEC Dimension Base .arx as I'm not running ADT or the like?

<SNIP>

Hi

When you Open the drawing file do you see a Proxy Warning dialog box ( make sure system variable ProxyNotice is set to 1 ) ?

If a Proxy Warning dialog box is displayed, it will indicate if there are AEC Objects or other Proxy Objects in the drawing file.

Have a good one, Mike

[rkmcswain]

All of the drawings are kept on a local server which makes me very nervous...I'd hate for our server to be doing something to the drawings.

Does your IS department perform nightly backups?
If so, retreive this drawing from the backup, is it OK? If not, then it looks like the damage was done at the time the DWG was written to disk.

What is your ISAVEPERCENT set to?

More suggestions at http://rkmcswain.blogspot.com/2005/1...-drawings.html (including the fact that Autodesk want's your corrupted drawings)

[Avatart]

Ok, this has been happening sporadically to drawings in our office - no like person, project, architect, anything as of yet. We'll come in in the morning and try to open a drawing we worked on the day before - comes up corrupt. I go to run a Recover and get the attached log, followed by ACAD freezing and my having to bail. Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?

I have had this problem on more than one occasion. What I found to be the problem was a file Xreffed into my drawing was corrupt. If you do a Recover on the Xrefs, save them, then do a recover on your errant file, it usually sorts it out.

The next thing to address is why the drawing went pear shaped in the first place. It is worthwhile checking you server disks for corruption, are they RAID enabled? RAID usually keeps your files uncorrupted, traditional file storage shows this effect much more often.

[CADKitty]

Ok, good news was I've been able to get some drawing back from the .bak files. However, we still don't know why it's doing this.

To answer questions:

-No proxy box appears, and it is turned on
-nightly backups are done, and when retrieved those are corrupt as well
-I'll have to Recover the xrefs just in case, and I'll ask about the RAID enabling

Thanks!

[david_peterson]

On a dump thought, have you tried to do a partial open, selecting only those layers contained in that drawing that you know shouldn't have any corrupt data on them, like say defpoints? This may help narrow down the issue. If you still can't open it in a partial open method, with only those layers contained in that drawing and the x-refs weren't on any other those layers, my thought would be that you can exclude the x-ref as the problem. Just a thought.

[rkmcswain]

RAID usually keeps your files uncorrupted, traditional file storage shows this effect much more often.

To what RAID level are you referring?

RAID 0 basically combines multiple disks to provide one storage unit.
RAID 1 is basically mirroring of the data, but the same data is written to both disks (corrupt or not)

Of course if this *is* a hardware issue, having multiple controllers and disks would make a difference.