[Daniel Hruby]

I am having a meltdown here. None of my applications can access my project folder with all my MXM's in it. It was working fine earlier today, but I found a few MXM,s that were missing textures or plain empty. Now I can not even load the folder containing my project MXM's so i can try to figure out which one is bad. MXED crashes just clicking on the folder. MXST crashes trying to access this folder and ArchiCAD is crashing when I try to link MXM'
s to my materials. There seems to be no way of figuring out what's wrong.

Any ideas out there? Can a corrupt MXM file in a folder of 100 good MXM's cause all these applications to crash?

[msantana]

Daniel,

Since the symptoms are not Maxwell-related but affect all applications, it sounds like you are having Volume issues (volume as in the volume mounted in your mac to work on).

Notice that I mentioned volume and not disk (the disk may be perfectly fine). Have you tried running disk utility on the volume? If you don't see any problems you could always restore everything from your back-up. You do back-up every day, right?

A full restore should fix this. Good luck and let us know if this fixed your problems.

M.

[Daniel Hruby]

Thanks M,

I see you are close by.

I think you are right. I did the disk utility and could only see the option to repair disk. It apparently is fine and does not need to be repaired. I could not do anything with permissions on that disk though.

I have noticed this problem recently and I am trying to recall what I might have done to create this problem. In hindsight, I have noticed that when going to save and open dialogs, I have a 20-30 second beach ball spinning before anything pops up in the window.

It may stem back to a system re-install I did a couple months ago and it added " /Volumes/ " in front of my external drive. I decided that since this is the default path that OSX wants, I left it and I ended up re-saving MXMs as needed. I eventually used Kabe's app to fix all paths on some 2000 MXMs.

But since doing that, I am getting further into a rut.

Is there any utility for OSX that can smooth this all out? Why would I need to do a restore? I do back up, but there are so many bits and pieces that this relates to, not to mention that many of my materials are updated through yesterday that I would probably never be able to restore things to where they need to be.

[msantana]

Well, it does sound like your volume is acting up.

Those 20 ~ 30 sec delays are not normal.

One very simple thing you could do is use Time Machine. I work in animation and most people in Video production would tell you to be really paranoid about your data, which roughly translates to backing it up to 2 or more different places on a daily basis minimum.

So what I do is backup to a Time-machine volume and manually back up my files to two other different places.

With this approach, you will lose at most one day of work, which is not as bad as losing the whole library of files you work on.

As far as I know the name of the volumes really don't have anything to do at all with volume problems. This sounds more like corruption of the volume, but this can only be diagnosed and corrected with a disk utility. Apple's is the first one that comes to mind since it comes with the OS, but any other would do.

If you don't have a restore option another thing you could try is to copy the offending folder to a new location, ideally an entirely different volume on a different disk and unmount the offending volume (and disk if possible) and see which files you can read. Usually, volume damages don't get transferred with this procedure, and you will be able to see which files are really damaged.

After this, I don't think you can get very far without the help of a professional i.e. a guy that can scan your disk with hardware and really extract as much information from the disk as possible, which I think is really overkill. But then again it is your call.

Yes, I do computer graphics (mostly high-def video) in San Francisco, downtown. I don't know any other Maxwell users in the bay area, but I am sure there are some.

Mauricio

[Daniel Hruby]

I do have a 1TB time machine and it is backing up as far as I can tell. In fact, it was soon after hooking this up that I started noticing this problem. I tried one time to "go back in time" to even see what I am backing up and try to restore something and it just froze on me after I selected a date in the past. I see dates going back to when I started backing up, but I can not access them. I wonder if somehow the Time Machine has retained the old paths and it is causing some issues as the finder looks for volumes, thereby causing the delays.

I really dont think there is anything worong with my Maxwell external drive per se. I will need to see if disconnecting the Time machine changes things first.

I did notice that some MXMs were empty in some of my folders. Possibly it haoppend after running Kabe's MXM checker. That would suck if I have random corrupted MXM's from using that utility.