AutoCAD Crashing when opening a file?

2013-03-03

If AutoCAD is crashing while opening one of your drawings it may have to do with one or more of the Xrefs.  Sure, it might be the drawing itself, but often it is a corrupt xref. Either way, the steps below may help you to recover that file and make it usable again.

Try these procedures.

Simple Recover:
Type Recover or use the File > File Utilities > Recover command. Sometimes this will work, sometimes not.

Try another Machine or AutoCAD:
Sometimes you can just open the drawing on another machine or with a different flavor of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT even.  You may have to do this if you can't do any of the following with your AutoCAD or on your machine.

Observe, then Audit / Recover:
While opening the drawing that crashes, watch the command line to see if it is crashing during the loading of an xref. See if you can open or recover that xref.

Recover with Xrefs:
File (or big A) > DrawingUtilities > Recover > Recover with Xrefs.  This should run a Recover on the drawing and all the xrefs.

Manually Audit/Recover everything:
Open each xref and run an Audit. Or, run a recover on each xref.

Wblock:
If you still have problems, open/recover the xrefs (you may have to use another machine) and Wblock them out as new, clean drawings. Rename your 'bad' xref and then rename the new Wblocked xref with the original xref name.

When you Wblock, make sure all your layers are Thawed, On, and Unlocked. Select the objects rather than Wblocking out the entire drawing. (These are options in the Wblock dialog box.)

Be aware that Wblocking by the selection method will not include any paperspace entities. Only the modelspace entities you select will be wblocked.   If you need the paperspace objects, you can use Design Center to drag the layout tabs back into the new file from the old file. Or you can Copy and Paste from old drawing to new drawing.  Just hope the paperspace objects were not the corrupt part of the drawing.

You probably should select by Window or Crossing or WindowPoly or CrossingPoly, (not All or Ctrl+A), to make sure only the visible things are saved to the new drawing. Crossing is the safer method in case there's an oddball block with a hard-to-see speck way off in space somewhere. That block would not be selected if you used the Window selection method and did not include that speck.

By the way, this Wblock method is just a great tool for really cleaning up any drawing.  Look at the file size before and after the Wblocking. It often will shave several Megabytes from the file size.

Lyle

Comparing AutoCAD settings

The other day, I came across a situation where grip editing a WIPEOUT worked in Civil 3D, but not in AutoCAD.  After looking around the usual forums, I did not find a good answer. I still haven't. But, what I did learn how to do is to compare settings from one AutoCAD to another.

*** Edit:  The answer is to uninstall Autodesk Sketchbook. It somehow messes with the wipeouts in AutoCAD.  Also, I did end up finding the answer on the Autodesk Discussion groups. I'm not sure how I missed it the first time. ***

I figured it must be some variable that was different. But how do I (easily) compare settings between my Civil 3D and my regular AutoCAD?

Here's how I ended up doing it.

Using Express Tools System Variable Editor, I saved the variables to a file from both programs (Civil 3D and AutoCAD).

I opened up each .svp file in Notepad, copied the entire contents and pasted the contents into Excel.  I put ACAD into column A, and Civil 3D into column B.  No need to sort or split into columns because we will be checking the value of each cell. Not necessarily the value of each variable.

I ran up and down Excel to verify that all rows matched up and to make sure one program didn't have some variables in it that the other did not.  I was surprised to see that there were the same number of variables between Civil 3D and AutoCAD. Or, at least that's what the System Variable Editor spits out.

In column C, I wrote a formula to compare the two columns or actually two cells, one from each column.  The formula I wrote was =IF(A1=B1,ok,DIFFERENT).  Copy that formula down the entire column and viola! you have a quick way to find all the variables that are different.

The syntax is :

IF( condition, [value_if_true], [value_if_false] )

So I entered:
=IF(A1=B1;"OK;"different")

The results in Excel or Open Office (shown) look like this:

And there you have it. A reasonably quick and easy way to compare settings between two AutoCADs or drawings.

Oh. I still haven't figured out why my Wipeouts don't show grips in my AutoCAD.  Other AutoCADs in the office work fine. A user with Mechanical has the same issue. The Wipeouts work  in my Civil 3D.  I don't think the Express Tools > Variable Editor reports all the variables.

Stating this prompted me to do some more sleuthing. I turned on my LOGFILE and typed SETVAR ? * to list all the system variables. I turned off LOGFILE and opened the log file in Notepad. I removed all the "Press Enter to continue" and other junk (find and replace makes quick work of that kind of stuff). A quick Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C (to select all and copy) and pasting it into Excel shows that the Variable Editor pumped out 727 variables and the SETVAR command shows 880 variables. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere.

Thanks for visiting,
Lyle

Chkdsk Horrors

Well, as usual it's been a while, but since I'm waiting for a few thousand files to be recovered, I figure I'd share my woes with anyone who just might be having similar issues.

The hard drive in my old computer was failing. Windows occasionally would not boot up properly. I've been pretty good about keeping photos and movies on two, 1 Terra byte external hard drives but failed to do so with everyday "My Documents" kind of things.  I'm going to look into Raid storage now, so that may be a topic for a future post.

Today's post is what to do and better yet, what not to do.

The old computer finally would not boot. Windows repair disk did not work.
After several hours of booting, (or not booting) I finally just took out the hard drive and placed it into my newer computer thinking I would just copy the files.


Easier said than done...

I had to set the BIOS so the computer would boot from the proper hard drive and then had to tell device manager to find the old hard drive I just put in.  Sounds easy enough, but it took a few hours, some Googling and several boot ups to figure all that out.

When my computer and Windows Explorer finally saw the old hard drive, I found out I could not access the various Users folders I needed to get to. Access denied.  Really? Come on!  Upon one of the subsequent boot ups, Windows informed me that the old hard drive had errors and suggested running Chkdsk.  After ignoring that a few times I allowed Windows to do so.

Mistake.

After seeing page after page of "Deleting links to ....." it finally finished.  And so was my old hard drive. There were no files on it and there was 500 Gig free space. There was a folder named Recover.000 with nothing in it. Great.

After a bit more Googling, which I did find one post that said not to do a check disk, I discovered some restore or undelete utilities.

One that I'm using now and I rather like is "Active@ File Recovery".  I downloaded and tried the trial which will find all your deleted files but will only restore files up to 64k.  It worked for me and I purchased it using PayPal for $29.  A bargain.

I've now scanned my old hard drive after making an image copy of it with the same software.  Scanning took about 5 hrs and I can now browse through the scanned image and recover the files I want or need.

There were some glitches.  I first tried a Full scan which probably would've taken a few days. I let it run overnight, only to find my computer had restarted and I lost all the scanning work. I then chose a quicker scan and it did the same thing, but much, much faster.   I then decided to make the disk image and scan that. It would scanning the image just fine, but if I tried to search during the scan things would crash and I'd have to start all over again.  My scan of the original old HDD (not the saved image) worked fine and I've been restoring from that with good success.  I just tried to search for some *.dwg files and it has crashed on me again.   But, I think I now have everything I was looking for.

Thankfully, I've recently been placing most of my things on Google Drive so I don't really have to worry about this anymore. At least not this specifically. Who knows what will happen to Cloud storage over the years?

Best of luck to you if you've stumbled upon this post because you've lost files or messed up a hard drive with chkdsk!

Later,
Lyle.