lost a day due to this bug....

It happened again - (first time about 2 months ago)

Short version:

Open a drawing when you don't have all the parts referenced in the
drawing already opened and (sometimes) solidworks will lock up.

Files open at the time become corrupt and will never open again,
including backup files (in the swbackup folder)

Longer:
I designed a family tool today with 5 seperate parts. Finished the
mold assembly this afternoon. Started the drawing. Decided to open
another sw drawing to reference some information - the above error
occurs - forcing me to kill task and restart sw. Try to open my family
tool part (sldprt file around 50mb in size) and sw gives an 'error
opening document' message and then crashes....

Guess what I'm doing tonight.

Zander

 

That's a great idea! I havn't used eco-squeeze for ages. It's funny
(but a little sad) because I just finished rebuilding the assembly.
But I will try it later for fun.

Does this happen to you often? I've used solidworks since '99 and I've
had files become corrupted exactly 3 times. Today via the the dwg bug
mentioned, about 2 months ago via the exact same bug and about 5 years
ago when a drawing went bad.

This kind of corruption is difficult to recover from because the
autobackup's are corrupted as well, and no autorecover information is
available. I have many levels of backup (raid, online and nightly to
portable drives) but they don't protect against this type of failure
either - only instant backup software does that and that's the only
thing I don't use. I mean I can still count corrupted files on one
hand....

BTW, my online backup service (carbonite) had a copy of the file that
was good but was only at the 20% mark, still better than nothing!

Zander

 

Ricky, can you hazard a guess as to why ecosqueeze would accomplish
relieving file corruption?

Bo

 

Ok, I tried it - but the eco-squeezed file crashes solidworks now.
It's different than before where I received a 'failed to open document'
type error. Now I'm getting a 'pure virtual function call' type of
error.

Thanks,

Zander

 

I will add an answer here, if the corruption affects things, such as the
inbedded preview icon, eco-squeeze can remove this part of the document,
thus "sometimes" saving the document. But not always.

 

Sounds like this has been repeated many times and so what does
SolidWorks or their VARs say?

Thanks - Bo

 

Zander & All Who Have Had Corrupt Drawings,
I'll try to keep this short. I too have had corrupt drawings from
time to time, few & far between thankfully. Well, we recently upgraded
from SW04 to SW06 SP 5.0 and everything was running smoothly until a
week and half ago when I had one individual with 2 drawings that would
not open. Well, they would open but while resolving, an error came up
stating that the file was corrupt and SW should be contacted, then SW
would crash.
I tried conversion of the files, I sent the files to my VAR. One
office could open them in any version of SW07 another could open them
in SW06 SP5.1. So upgrade to fix the problem. I said no thank you. We
just performed an upgrade.
I was about to tell my co-worker to redo each drawing as the models
appeared to be fine but then I thought I'd try one more thing.
I used the File Open dialog box, changed the reference from the
current assembly to a part file I had laying around. The drawing opened
with errors of course but it did open, so I saved it as is. After
closing, I went back to the File Open dialog box and changed the
reference back to the original assembly file. Believe it or not it
opened just fine. Some clean-up was required to get the drawing back to
normal but it sure beat redoing the entire assembly drawing.
In this particular case, I do not know if it was simply a link error
between drawing & model or what, but it worked on both drawings.
Worth a try if you've exhausted all other possibilities.
HTH
Eddie

 

Eddie, this is starting to make sense now. Hot dog.

1. User has a project open with drawings (linked etc.) then something
"comes up" and another dwg is opened to "check things".
2. Somewhere along the way a "Save" probably happens one way or
another.
3. A reference gets swapped somehow by Swks &
4. Blam...the file won't open or is flagged as corrupted.
5. Eddie the Goalie's "Save Solution": Reattach the right reference
to the dwg.

This ought to give SolidWorks developers enough to start to track down
the problem, as that points to sloppy code in keeping references
properly tracked when multiple assemblies, parts and drawings are all
open at once.

Great Stuff - Bo

 

Also, simply saving your file with a new name will often reduce
drawing file sizes to 50% of the current size. The size issue afaik
all has to do with the 'microsoft compound file' spec.

I think this is it (can anyone confirm that?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_File_Binary_Format

Zander

 

Bo,
Thank's for the nice reply but don't over do it, I have a big head
already.
As far as a broken link, reference, whatever, I agree that SolidWorks
should have something to go on with this. Like I said earlier, when I
asked several employees of my VAR, they really had no idea what to do.
What clued me in was that I had another drawing for the exact same
assmbly model and it opened just fine, so I knew the model was no to
blame.
Eddie

 

Bo,
Thank's for the nice reply but don't over do it, I have a big head
already.
As far as a broken link, reference, whatever, I agree that SolidWorks
should have something to go on with this. Like I said earlier, when I
asked several employees of my VAR, they really had no idea what to do.
What clued me in was that I had another drawing for the exact same
assmbly model and it opened just fine, so I knew the model was no to
blame.
Eddie

 

It definately was not a reference issue in my case. See the new thread
posted called 'new kind of lockup' - this is a much more succinct
description of what happened (and has occured to me approx. 30-40 times
since I got 2007 (although usually it just crashes and doesn't corrupt
files))

Zander