Well, it has certainly been a month for wierdness from AutoCAD! I wish I had been thinking right, and copped screenshots of the error messages, but here goes.
I started out my day firing up a dwg in AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010, part of the same project that glitched out so bad a couple weeks ago. Beep! The message says that the drawing is corrupted and can't be loaded, but that I should try Recover...
We've seen that before, really, and it happens. No big deal. So I tried another drawing from the same project - and got it again. Now we're at "uh-oh."
Tried a third, and this time I got a different message. Instead of "can't be loaded", the message tells me that there have been around 6,000 errors detected in a couple sections of loading. Do I want to continue trying, or bag it. Well, gang, we know have permission to be concerned.
Let's try a different workstation. Won't load here either? OMG. How about a different project? NO? Put an eff in that oh em gee!
Golly, this must be Monday. Count to ten, chant a couple "omm"s... try that count in Japanese, Spanish...
Calm... I do still have a couple things I can check before I start looking online for answers. Let's try a dwg from a different drive. A few mouse clicks, and... everybody can breathe. It loaded!! Dancing in the streets time, everybody! We actually have a CLUE!
So SOMETHING'S still wrong with that first drive, so back to work. How about copying a file to our good drive. BZZZTTT - again!?! You can't even copy & paste a file? What does the dialog say this time?
The bad news is actually good news. And something new for us all, I bet - no space on the disk. The SOURCE disk. ????
Did you know that you need some space on your file server to copy & paste a file to another drive? I sure wouldn't have expected that, but that's what's going on here. The share on the file server is really, truly, full. Like zero kilobytes available.
It IS kinda wierd, but this is something we can fix. I love it when I can fix it! After a restart of the server, which frees up some space, I did some archiving and cleared out some projects. Can't do much, though. We share this server with the GIS guys. "Share" meaning that they use up about 95% while 3 solid years of CAD files, including imagery, PDFs, and support files, city, state, and federal drawing standards, standard details, highway stds, railroad stds, even three years of CAD install files and service packs, make up the other 5%.
I've knocked off about 40 gigs by the end of the day, and they've cleared out about a gig. Doggone the GIS guys and their precious data. In ten minutes I can show them the exact same data four times in their stuff. And that GIS stuff is really horrible when it comes to storage efficiency. The typical shape file can be cut in half by a simple cleanup, while actual compression, like zip, can take it down to around 10%.
OK, you don't really need to hear that rant, though some of you probably live it. I mention it to bring up the subject of what clearing a LITTLE space does for you. It's kind of odd, too...
With no more than a gig or two available, my drawings loaded up OK, but for some reason, none of the xrefs resolved. Xrefs got found, and showed the correct location & file in the "Found at:" slot on the Xref Manager - even with relative pathing saved - they all still said "Not Resolved" in Xref Manager's status column. Right-clicking and reloading fixed them right up, and getting a decent 30-40 gigs clear on the server left us back to normal for now.
Well, I hope someday that helps. One of us will get a panicked call from our users, or even somebody else's users (that happens to me more than you might expect) and the memory of this experience will make us look like geek gods.
Just make sure to play it for all the geekly worship you deserve!
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