Missing drawing

[Anonymous]

I've been working on a drawing for the past couple days. When I went to open it today, the drawing preview screen came up shoing the previe and every thing looked fine. When I opened the drawing I could see it while it was loading, then disappeared and we can't find it. When I edit the points it tells me the points are all still there, as well as an aerial that I had inserted. We cannot, however, see any linework, text or points, just a blank screen. Is there anything we I did to create this problem, and is there anything we can do to fix it? Thanks

[ccoles]

Have you run a recovery on the drawing? Do you have a backup copy (*.bak)?

[Anonymous]

We have run a recovery with the same results, and were able to get a backup to open from 2 days before. The problem is we lost 2 days of work. Just trying to prevent it in the future and looking for a fix if it is not preventable.

[rkmcswain]

The drawing preview is simply a snapshot of the file as it was last saved and is no indication of what you might see when you actually read/open the file due to missing xrefs, corruption of the file, etc.

You said it disappeared, so does that mean the drawing entities appeared on the screen for a second? Did you review the command line history to see if some action occurred that was logged?

Presuming you did not save it again after opening it, can you post the DWG here?

[rkmcswain]

Moe727 wrote:

....were able to get a backup to open from 2 days before.

Do you mean to say that the .BAK file was 2 days older than the .DWG?

The .BAK file is only one save older than the latest DWG file, so you would have had to work on the file for two days without saving at all in order to lose 2 days worth of work going back to the BAK file. Maybe you meant some other backup file?

[Anonymous]

The entities did appear on the screen for a moment, a bar came up that said "stylizing" when that was done the drawing disappeared. And the command line history showed nothing out of the ordinary.

[Anonymous]

*bak was no help, we keep copies of our drawings after each day until the project is finished. It was one of these copies we were able to open.

[ccoles]

Did you try 'drawingrecovery' to see if there was an autosave back-up? This isn't always reliable unless you've had a crash, but you may get lucky.

I had a Civil 3D file go bad on me earlier this week. I got no indication of anything wrong at the end of the day when I saved out and shut down. But the next day, the file hung up my computer, caused Civil 3D to crash, and refused to open. Recovery did not help. But, I was able to open the .bak file without issue and just continued on. I've had to resort to 'drawingrecovery' to see if I had an auto-save copy a few times. It just happens like that.

[KirkNoonan]

If you select all objects in the drawing - do a quick select, erase, move, etc. and type 'all' at the command line and hit enter, how many objects are shown as being selected? That will show you if the objects are actually gone, or just not being displayed. There are several possibilities for the objects not being displayed. First, you need to find out if they are there or not.

[rkmcswain]

...and if "Select, All" doesn't return anything (or much), then try the command DBLIST.

[Stewarjr]

I"m using AutoCAD Map 3D.  I'm having the same problem.  When the file is opening, I can see all my drawing.  When I select all, I can see I have 2,600 objects selected.  Nothing is on the screen and nothing can be manually selected.  There's no frozen layers, the transparancy is 70, and nothing can be viewed from layout either.  Did you guys ever get any help on this as it seems to be the same issue I"m having.

[pne123]

I would turn on and unfreeze all layers, copy all and paste into a new file.

[Stewarjr]

Thanks for the reply.  As I mentioned in the post, there are no frozen layers.  Also, I seem to be having the issue with all new files.  I can see it as soon as it's pasted.  However, after saving, closing, and reopening, I can see it while loading but once loaded I get the same thing...  a blank/empty model.  I got my original linework data from Plex Earth.  I don't know if that has anything to do with it.  It's frustrating knowing the info is there it just can't be viewed.

[pne123]

Can you select items when in a command? Maybe it is a hardware issue. Do you have graphic card hardware acceleration on? Toggle it on and off. Try each way.

[AllenJessup]

I think I've seen this problem in the forum before but couldn't turn it up in a search. Try doing a WBlock using Select All. Make sure there are no layers that are frozen or locked. If you can see your work in the new drawing. Insert it into a new drawing from template. You could also try a copy/paste.

Allen