Critical Deadline and Crashed Civil 3D Drawing

[sduffin]

All - a desperate question for all those elite experts out there!  We have a few civil 3D files that crashed the other night and we have not been able to recover them. Of course, we are under a tight deadline and our network backup creates the same operating system crash when we try to open the files.  One of the files is a grading file using feature lines and grading objects.  The other file is a corridor-based grading.  We can open all of our other project files, but any file that xrefs them in our 60+ sheet set crashed in flames.  This is a deadline critical issue for us and we are working from all angles.  We have engaged our Autodesk Reseller and have completely stumped them, and it has been escalated to Autodesk but we are told that Autodesk support may take 3-4 days or longer which is far too long for our critical deadline.  The crazy thing is that some of the info can be read from the drawing database through multiple methods but they cannot be opened.  The drawing database can be read but it cannot be opened in DWG.  Our reseller support member was very thorough and went through a boat load of things, but ultimately passed it on to Autodesk.

I am uploading the files for anyone who is looking for an extreme challenge to see who can recover them and make them openable.  Whoever you are you would be a rockstar.

Thanks in advance for anyone who can take on this challenge.

[user181]

The attached dwg works on my computer. What is in the other dwg?  Is it civil 3d objects or from some other program?

[rl_jackson]

So I have made multiple attempts with @sduffin and they have cause many Win10 issues, @user181 you got one done but I'm leaning towards a little viral issue. I would recommend the OP send the files to ADesk. I personally had some really weird **** happen (pardon my french)

[rl_jackson]

@Pointdump this is close I think.

Folks I'm always one to help here and I don't recommend downloading...

[sduffin]

Wow you are the first one of many people to successfully open the VC Corr drawing!  Very encouraging.  I am not sure you did anything to the repost of that file, but I downloaded it and it crashed my computer after 15 minutes of trying to open it.  I know this is a big ask, but would you be willing to open it again, detach the xrefs, purge/recover, etc. and then send it back over again?  Also, we are very interested in getting any smart Civil 3D data out of the drawing.  Could you create shortucts to any and all of the C3D objects in that file you were able to open, reference them into a clean drawing, promote the shortcuted items and resend?  That may be a backdoor to get a clean drawing.

The other file is our main grading design file for this 16 acre site.  It has LOTS of feature lines and grading objects to define the surface, and references the one file you were able to open.  Our retailer support guy escalated the drawings to Autodesk  but we don't have the luxury of time as these files took many months to create and we need them to keep the proejct moving ASAP (without having to recreate).  We know the database is still good as we are able to open it in Truevue and access it from the design center and the FG surface from a data shortcut.  However, It just locks up the memory and the computer for anyone who tries to open it (that was your experience).

While waiting on Autdesk, I thought there might be a way to access the data from Project Explorer?  Or Dynamo?  Or some other method?  If we could just get the feature lines and the grading objects from the 2nd file that would be huge step in the right direction and would lessen our rebuild time.  Ideally , someone would be able to open both files.  If anyone else has any suggestions while we wait on Autodesk to try to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much for your willingness to respond to those who have done so already!

[user181]

@sduffin  Attached is a new file with the xrefs detached. Hope this helps.  If you have any other backup versions of the other one, maybe a day or so earlier I can take a look at them but the one you attached before I can't seem to do anything with.   

[Neilw_05]

One troubleshooting technique is to open a problematic C3D dwg in plain Autocad. This will result in the C3D functionality being disabled and the file may open normally. From there you can start removing C3D objects incrementally, saving and reopening in C3D to see if the removed objects make a difference. Once you have narrowed down the problem objects, go back to the original C3D file and remove the bad objects, then re-open in C3D.

[sduffin]

Thanks that is a good suggestion that we may try.

I was able to open the VC-Corr drawing using the partial open option.  I tried then to copy the contents to a new file but it crashed and I haven't been able to open it since.  Strange that one of you could open it without issue but it is hanging on our machines.

Thanks again to all who have responded.  We will keep working away and hopefully our Autodesk support friends can quickly recover and resolve these issues!

[sduffin]

FYI it hangs when trying to open in just AutoCAD so that is not an option.  The interesting thing is that you can see on the screen that all the drawing elements are intact, but it hangs on reading triangles. Does anyone know a way to open a drawing while having it ignore reading the shortucts?  Thanks for your input!

[Neilw_05]

You can break the path to the shortcuts (i.e. open the file off the network, etc). However that likely won't stop the surface from loading. When you create a reference to a shortcut, there is a setting that tells C3D to store a snapshot of the surface in the dwg so that it will still load when it can't find the shortcut.

Also, when you open it in plain ACAD, the shortcut functionality is disabled, so you already know that is not going to help.

Apparently the surface is set to a style that displays the triangles, so that is why you see them when you open in plain CAD.

One more thing you can try: If you have access to a machine with Autocad but not C3D, it may help. The reason being the machine would not have the object enablers installed like you have when you open on a machine with C3D installed. Without the object enablers, the triangles will not display. The surface will be displayed as a box. That is how it worked in the past. I don't know if things have changed in that regard. It's been awhile since I dealt with OE's.

[sduffin]

Thanks everyone for weighing in on this request.  Oddly enough we were able to recover the VC-Corr drawing by running the simple but older Clean PC program.  We renamed our corrupt files so that they wouldn't be xref'ed into the plan sheets and then we could open all the plan sheets without fail.  The interesting thing is that the data shortucts to these renamed files still worked even though, at the time, we could not open them.  The last hurdle was that we could not edit any of these corrupt files (until yesterday).  The workaround for the drawing that had all of our grading objects and feature lines was to shortcut out the surface, extract the feature lines as 2d polylines from Trueview, convert those to feature lines, and we had a workable version of our grading base (VC drawing).  Not ideal but a workable solution.  It is still escalated to Autodesk support to see if it can still be recoverded as that would close the loop on this issue and would get us back to where we started before this crash. 

Thanks again for the insights and help!