lost a day due to this bug....

Oh Man-that sucks. Might be helpful to know what version/sp you're on.

Long ago I instituted a personal policy of not opening up parts from other jobs than the one I was working on. This is a PITA when I get a phone call about another job, but I always save,close and open up what I need to look at. Saves a lot of heartache.

Good Luck,

jk

Zander,

I know it isn't "officially" supported by SolidWorks, but did you try running EcoSqueeze on the corrupted files? Sometimes this works for us.

Ricky Jordan CSWP Dynetics, Inc. Huntsville, AL

check out my blog at

Zander wrote:

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 Jordan wrote:

Zander,

I think since 2000 I have had one file that was completely corrupt that nothing could fix. Most of the issues we have had were with Drawings of large assemblies where the file size really gets bloated. In some instances the files would start yielding error messages. In every instance I can remember, EcoSqueeze saved the day!

Best Regards,

Ricky Jordan CSWP Dynetics, Inc. Huntsville, AL

check out my blog at

Zander wrote:

Funnily engough (or not) I had corrupted files when editing a drawing yesterday, seemed to be related to a cut view of a section. Was quite repeatable, didn't have time to document it besides I doubt my VAR, or SolidWorks would care since I'm still on 2006, they would probably advise me to upgrade to 2007 :).

At the time I was playing around overclocking my PC by about 8%, since switched to a safe 3%, although I doubt the overclocking was the cause I can't entirely rule it out.

John Layne

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

Bo

Ricky Jordan wrote:

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

Ricky Jordan wrote:

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

pete the first wrote:

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

Eddie wrote:

Bo,

The only trait that is common between the Drawing files I have had problems with is the file size itself. Everytime we had the issue, it was with Drawings of large assemblies. If I remember correctly, the file size was reduced by sometimes as much as 200% after running it through EcoSqueeze. I really don't know what drives up the file size, but usually it is a Drawing that is on at least it's third revision.

Eddie's solution is very interesting. The next time I have a problem like this, I will try his method first.

Best Regards,

Ricky Jordan CSWP Dynetics, Inc. Huntsville, AL

check out my blog at

Bo wrote:

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?)

Ricky Jordan wrote:

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

Bo wrote: