Drawing from hell

[Anonymous]

Long time lurker, first time poster here.  Looking to see if anybody out there can help out.  We have a drawing that keeps crashing autocad either during opening, or after opening.  We are using a mix of acad 2017 and mechanical 2017.  The drawing started acting funny first with dimensions disappearing and reappearing at random.  Now, it seems like every time you try and do anything in the drawing, it will give the fatal error.  I have tried to audit & recover but still end up with the same problems.  Hoping somebody will have come across this problem and might have a solution. 

[cadffm]

Can only see user made problems but no technical problems.

What should i do to force a crash, please explain the steps.

Whorst thing: Fileformat DWG2000

You should use Fileformat dwg2013 (and Mechanical2016 if you need this)

Please save a copy as DWG2013 and try it again - i have no error, so i can not test it.

[Patchy]

AECtoACAD before using plain Autocad should fix them.

[S.Faris]

I tried working in the file and nothing seems odd in there and it never crashed. I'm working on Autocad 2019, So i believe the issue has something to do with your Autocad

Try installing Latest service packs & Hotfixes/Object-enablers from below links

Autocad 2017 : https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/downloads?release=2017

Autocad Mechanical 2017 : https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-mechanical/downloads?release=2017

[craig_macdonald]

This is pure guess work but we had a similar problem with a drawing that had been cobbled together from multiple sources and too many hatches/erase/insert.

Switch off/freeze all layers you don't need and then DXFOUT all visible elements (use the Tools/DXF Options and tick the 'Select Objects' option)

Start a clean template and DXFIN the information.

You will lose the paperspace information but the time saved trying to recover the crashes more than makes up for having to reinsert borders/title blocks.

Hope that helps

[Anonymous]

Thanks for taking a look at it for me.  I went ahead and saved it as 2013.  It seems that after doing that, it doesn't seem to give me the error anymore, but I still can't see most of the dimensions that are there.  Is there some setting that would cause that problem?

[BeKirra]

1st of all, I don't know your dimensions are in model space or in layout.

However you know the layer(s) for your dimensions, right?

Then you have to check if the layer(s) are turned off or frozen in 2 places below:

1) model space/layouts

2) all viewports in layouts (double click inside the viewports to check if your dimension layer(s) are turned off or frozen)

HTH