#odd behavior & file crpt
20 messages in this thread
HELP!
I was working on an object today and about halfway through it Imagine crashed.
I have learned from my previous mistakes, so I had it saved and only lost a
little work. When I Loaded the file after the crash The solid view looked like
it had triangles going all through it. The other views looked fine. after a few
minutes of playing with it to see if I could fix it Imagine crashed again. I
rebooted and loaded the file again and save the file out as a different file
when I tried to load the file I got the message Not a TDDD file. I tried saving
it as a dxf file and then loading it again. First time it worked, but there
were a few faces missing. After fixing just about all the missing faces, you
guessed it, Imagine crashed again. Once again I tried reloading the DXF file.
Imagine seems to load it, but it just hangs with the "busy" cursor after. I
<sigh> rebooted again and started Imagine this time I didn't load anything.
After a few minutes, Bingo! It crashed again. I tried reinstalling the
imagine.exe file from the disk. I tried scandisk, chkdsk,and about three virus
scanners and nothing seems to help. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I
really don't need these problems right now.
Thanks,
-Sam J. Bowling
Sam,
Don't know what could be causing the problems you are experiencing..especially
after rebooting and running Imagine without loading anything else. First thing
I would do is try a cold boot….that is, turn machine off, then on again. I
have at times, few as they were had software (especially windows software)
trash my system where a reboot wouldn't help.
After that I'd check my HD for errors. I would do this by saving my object
file to another HD or HD partition. That is, if your setup is conducive to
that.
Lastly, if the HD seems to be fine, run a diagnostic on your system memory.
-GreG
P.S. Are you running Imagine in a DOS session through Windows 95 beta? If so,
that may be causing your problems.
>> First thing I would do is try a cold boot…. <<
Tried it. Things seem to be mellowing out (I even saved the object), but I was
still getting a few periodic crashes yesterday. I'm going to defrag my disk and
see if that does anything to help.
>> Lastly, if the HD seems to be fine, run a diagnostic on your system memory.
<<
How would I go about that?
>> Are you running Imagine in a DOS session through Windows 95 beta? If so,
that may be causing your problems. <<
Nope. No Win ninety-something here.<g> You know a horses body is really easy
to model. If it wasn't for the problems I think I could have finished the whole
thing yesterday. It's by no means perfect, but it does look awful darn good.<g>
-Sam J. Bowling
>> How would I go about that?
Sam,
I'd access the PC File Finder and search for memory diagnostic tools. One of
your chips may be flaky. Actually, dos your BIOS offer a built in memory
diagnostic? It may, I believe the AMI BIOS does.
-GreG
>> I'd access the PC File Finder and search for memory diagnostic tools. <<
Thanks GreG. The funny thing is only Imagine causes the crash. No problems in
any other app. I'd guess it's probably somewhat related to how they access
memory?
-Sam J. Bowling
Well, GreG, it looks like the crashes I've been having are being caused by
Imagine. I went out and bought Norton Utilities 8.0 and Norton antivirus and
ran every type of test they had. No memory problems, no disk problems, no IRQ
conflicts and no virus (viruses? viri?<g>). Any other ideas? It's really tough
to get anything done when Imagine keeps crashing for no apparent reason. Maybe
I should post a message over in amigaven?
-Sam J. Bowling
Sam,
I haven't the foggiest. I haven't heard of this type of behavior from anyone
else either here in CIS or on the Imagine Mailing List. Don't know what to
tell you. Leave a message for Mike over in ANVENA, not AmigaVen. He'll never
see it in AmigaVen.
-GreG
>> I haven't heard of this type of behavior from anyone else either here in
CIS <<
Neither have I, that's why I went through so much trouble to make sure it
wasn't my system. I think I'm going to do a complete re install of Imagine
(should have thought of this before) before I post any messages to Mike.
>> Leave a message for Mike over in ANVENA, not AmigaVen. <<
Uh, yeah, that's what I meant.<g> I got the names confused.
-Sam J. Bowling
>>
I think I'm going to do a complete re install of Imagine (should have thought
of this before) before I post any messages to Mike.
<<
Sam,
The only thing to re-install is the IMAGINE.EXE file. The rest if it, textures
& special effects wouldn't cause you any problems in the Detail editor.
Hmmm….textures……maybe a texture got corrupted? This may surface during
or sometime after Quickrendering.
-GreG
>> Hmmm….textures……maybe a texture got corrupted? This may surface
during or sometime after Quickrendering. <<
I would have to rule that out, because I had a crash one after loading imagine
and just letting it set on the startup screen. Thanks for reminding me I only
have to load the Imagine.exe. I was going to go back to 3.0 then 3.1 then
3.2… DUUH!
-Sam J. Bowling
Sam,
What about TSRs, programs running in the background, like a virus
detector? Did you try booting with “clean'' Config.sys, and Autoexec.bat
files? Did you install some other new software on your computer just before the
crashes began happening? Also, what about your mouse, or graphics drivers?
Mouse driver might seem unlikely, but I think I heard of someone else having
similar problems because of it. Have you run a diagnostic on your Math
co-processor lately? When EXACTLY does the program crash? What sort of stuff do
you have in your scene? Lots of texture mapped objects? This could help us
isolate the problem.
-Tim
Non of my TSR's have changed in quite a while. After I started having the
crashes I bought the Norton virus and disk programs.
>> Did you try booting with “clean'' Config.sys, and Autoexec.bat files? <<
Since the crashes are so random it could be a week before I have a crash, if I
have one at all. And having to reboot every time I run Imagine would be a major
PITA.
>> Also, what about your mouse, or graphics drivers? <<
Mouse driver is the same thing I've been running since about the time I
started using Imagine. I bought a new video card a few months ago, but the
crashes didn't start happening until just recently.
>> Have you run a diagnostic on your Math co-processor lately? When EXACTLY
does the program crash? <<
I'm not sure if NU has a test for that, but if it does I ran it.<g> I'll
double check. Like I said, the crashes seem completely random. The scene I was
working on at the time is much smaller than what I usually am working on. I
wasn't even rendering except for an occasional quick render. I had one crash
when I wasn't doing anything. I loaded the scene into Imagine and started doing
something else and all of a sudden it crashed. I just loaded Imagine once and
left it at the startup screen for a while and it crashed again. The thing is
all crashes were while I had Imagine running. I haven't had any crash problems
(except in a beta I'm testing) in quite a long time. I've only had one crash in
Imagine in the past week, so whatever the problem was it seems to be receeding.
I'm completely stumped though, whatever it is.
I even reloaded the executables for imagine from the disk, but they were the
exact same size, so I don't think that was it.
-Sam J. Bowling
Sam,
If you can get the object to load again, try performing MERGE on it at
least three times. If the geometry is somehow corrupted this should repair it.
Once you've done this, then perform CHECK OBJ, to verify that the problems have
been fixed. Imagine is very good at repairing flaky geometry, if that's the
problem.
If you can't get the object to load into Imagine try taking it into
another program that will load DXF, save it out anew from there, reload it into
Imagine and perform the above steps on it.
Whenever you're modeling a complex object and doing a lot of point and
edge manipulation, it's a good idea to perform MERGE and CHECK OBJ
periodically, and especially after each intense editing session.
-Tim
>> If you can get the object to load again, try performing MERGE on it at
least three times. If the geometry is somehow corrupted this should repair it.
<<
Don't think I tried that. Something strange happened when I first saved it as
DXF. When I loaded it in the odd triangles where still visible, but there were
no points to edit them with. Anyways, I have it all going and I'm going to see
if I can get the head finished tonight. Thanks for the tips I'll keep them in
mind if this happens again.
>> Whenever you're modeling a complex object and doing a lot of point and
edge manipulation, it's a good idea to perform MERGE and CHECK OBJ
periodically, and especially after each intense editing session. <<
I'll keep this in mind too.
-Sam J. Bowling
Sam,
I had many many crashed lately, too. I didn't bother since I had not much work
to do, but now I got a job and I needed a running system. Since Imagine
crashed every 10 minutes I knew I had to find a solution. I tried different
configs, different drivers and so on, but nothing helped. I finally removed my
CD-ROM (still from the stone age) with it's own controller and my two sound
cards. Since then the problems were gone. When I have time I will one by one
check what card causes the trouble.
Once when I had many crashes I changed my BIOS setup and it helped.
sorry if I can't help more
-David
>> I finally removed my CD-ROM (still from the stone age) with it's own
controller and my two sound cards. Since then the problems were gone. <<
Well,…. I don't really want to pull my computer apart.<g> I have a SCSI cd
rom drive that hooks into my sound cards scsi slot. I'd still have to point my
finger at the way Imagine handles memory, because none of my other programs
have any problems. Of course it could be the program handles memory so well
that it is detecting a small memory problem that might go unnoticed by all the
other programs.<g> I never found any problems using the BOIS program you
recommended, BTW. Guess I'll check my memory now.
-Sam J. Bowling
>>
Of course it could be the program handles memory so well that it is detecting a
small memory problem that might go unnoticed by all the other programs.<g>
<<
Sam,
Well…Imagine will scour every bit of free memory in your system and attempt
to use it all to speed up rendering. Thats a reason for the
Initializing/Cleanup phase of rendering. It may be hitting an area of memory
at a high address that your system rarely even touches under normal everyday
use.
-GreG
>> It may be hitting an area of memory at a high address that your system
rarely even touches under normal everyday use. <<
True. BTW, that statement – while sounding obviously sarcastic – was a serious
statement.
-Sam J. Bowling
Imagine is defiantely very "fussy" about memory. With the Windows version this
will be completely different, … I hope! 🙂
-David
>> With the Windows version this will be completely different, … I hope! <<
Me too.<g>
-Sam J. Bowling