Consistency Checking Error - What?

[Anonymous]

I had a user get this error recently. The screen-shot below is pretty bad, but you can get the general idea of what it looked like. It was a "Consistency Checking Error" and it gave him options to continue without saving, to save with some of the contents missing, or to return to the last autosaved version.

What triggers this? He says he was just adjusting a section marker. Any info is greatly appreciated!

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
IME experience this often occurs on computers with an error on the hard drive, like a bad sector. Is your HDD old? Have you defragged it lately? If not, I would recommend it along with saving the file somehwere else.

Just a suggestion, but I can't say it's 100% accurate or what GS suggests with this warning.

Just thought I'd follow this up with some results...

The HDD is about 3.5 years old but this is the only instance that this error ever took place... but who knows right...one could speculate that the HDD is in the beginning of a 'downfall'. Still a mystery.

Well I tried a few things and got some interesting results:
1. Did a 'save as' of the project within the same folder - still got the error
2. Did a 'save as' in a different folder - no error message ?!
3. Tranfered the new file back to the original folder- got the error again
4. Did not work on the project for days so didn't mind the error anymore.
5. Worked on it yesterday..(all the while...still getting the error message when saving).. at one point deleted a hotlink of a story from the same file that I didn't need to refer to anymore..(could of used the trace thingy now that I think of it)...at which point I no longer got the error message every time I did a save.

Conclusion: (In my case) The problem was the hotlink. My hotlink was placed in such a way that it was intersecting other 3d elements and perhaps didn't like something thus creating the error.... Or something on that story from which I hotlinked from is corrupted but will never know because I get no warning of such case. Hope this Analysis helps anybody else who confronts this mind boggling error.

My suggestion if you get this error (based on what I went through): Start by deleting some of your hotlinks and see if that solves the error.

[Link]

Is it possible the modules were on a bad sector?

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Link wrote:
Is it possible the modules were on a bad sector?

It's possible, but not certain. How does one go about confirming whether or not a certain module is on a bad sector or not?

Just to clarify: The hotlink was from another story from the same (pln) project. So there were no other files involved. Just one .pln file.

[Link]

Where's that shoulder shrugging emoticon when you need it?

You could try http://www.ehow.com/how_113636_fix-sectors-hardfix-sectors-hard.html

Cheers,
Link.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the link Link. I just finished scanning. Not one trace of bad sectors.
I conclude that a corrupt object or operation exist on the story that was hotlinked.

[Dwight]

That is a good conclusion.
I've seen this before.

Since i work with lots of curved and strange objects, i occasionally create an irrational element - a mobius-like slab having negative and positive aspects, say. A wildly swooping complex profile stretched binary can disintegrate to the point where the machine can't make sense of it.

Sometimes i ignore or forget the warning/repair request that occurs.

It is almost certain that in this circumstance Archicad will do a consistency check and display the inconsistency message. Then i remember the prior warning message.