Open all the external xrefs, audit/purge and save them. Open the real dwg and do a print preview if they show up great you’re done if they are not there.

Open the xrefs again and save them down to v2000 save and try again.

This is a huge problem for us too….

We experience this issue very randomly…which makes it an even bigger issue. We never know when its happening or when its going to happen. It goes away for a month then comes back.

AutoDesk is aware of the issue, but I have yet to see any solutions come from them.

Has anyone reported this to AutoDesk?

Any response?

I don’t see anyone having solved this anywhere.

Thanks

Well, win some lose some. I haven’t come across this particular problem because due to client standards we don’t use dynamic blocks. Not my choice, believe me.

Back to the drawing board, as it were…

There is a way to find out what version created a given drawing; just change the extention on a .dwg to .txt, open it in notepad or whatever, and the first line will tell you the version used to create it.

AC1006 = R10
AC1009 = R11/12
AC1012 = R13
AC1014 = R14/14.01
AC1015 = 2000, 2000i, 2002
AC1018 = 2004, 2005, 2006
AC1021 = 2007, 2008, 2009

^^^ Thanks to Dan Abbot’s AutoCAD Puzzlers class for that.

Hope that helps.

-Jim

I can now confirm that this problem still occurs in 2007 SP2.

Using Recover did discover a few errors that Audit missed, but the Recover – Purge – Audit – Save process didn’t solve the problem in my sample drawing.

As these drawings come from an outside contractor that itself contracts out to another company, and as the drawings date back to 2006 (the year, not the release), things are shrouded in mystery. It’s hard to be sure what releases have been used on them. The first date on the sample drawing pictured is 24 April 2006, one month after AutoCAD 2007 was released. So it’s likely that AutoCAD 2006 was used to create it, although 2007 is possible. The drawing has been revised multiple times since then, right up to this month.

There is no obvious evidence that any vertical releases were used, and I can’t tell where the dynamic blocks came from.

We are in exactly the same situation as you with the need to save back to 2000 DWG format. This drawing would definitely have been saved back to 2000 format at the time (we enforce this), and it’s in 2000 format now.

I haven’t tried using anything non-Autodesk on them yet. I’m still investigating.

Thanks for posting this.

I am the CAD manager for one division (of nine) of a large mining company. Each of our divisions has about 10 to 40 CAD users (total of probably a couple of hunderd or more users) and we use more consultants than we have in house, add to this all of our equipment vendors. So we have thousands of CAD files and our collection is growing exponentially.

I see it as much more than a little dangerous, it has the potential for creating a major disaster. It is on the level that AutoDesk basically needs to do whatever it takes to fix this, it should be first priority period.

This goes beyond a bug, it is a major screwup, I won’t go into the potential problems that I envision, as they should be obvious.

I have a few questions.

1. I am assuming that the drawings were done in 2009 and saved to 2007 file format, is this correct?

2. Does saving them back to an earlier format make any difference? (Nothing to do with this, but we save to 2000 file format, this works very well for us with our outside vendors, some of whom use older versions. I see absolutly no justification at this point in time for changing this.)

3. Was straight AutoCAD used or one of the verticals? AutoCAD Electric?

4. Are the dynamic blocks involved created directly by the CAD draftsman, or are they generated automatically by a vertical application or by an addon package?

5. Has anyone tried using another CAD package to plot them? (Non-AutoDesk) I have found that IntelliCAD actually fixes (not screws up as some would have us to believe) some things that put AutoCAD into the toilet. (We have a lot of older dwgs done in Cadra that have some layers with unnamed linetypes that can crash AutoCAD that IntelliCAD fixes with just a “Save” command, no Audit, etc. required. This is just one example, I’ve used it to open and recover dwgs that AutoCAD just cannot do.)

DWG TrueView is not an option. (That’s a busted crutch, an administrative nightmare.) The Dwgs just have to plot right, period.

If this is not fixed, I will have to consider modifying our CAD standards to ban the use of dynamic blocks, or if they are used that they must be exploded prior to submission and that any vendor that does not comply will be liable for all resulting damages. (Don’t anyone start ragging on not exploding blocks, not when the potential is for corrupted output. Correct output everytime, anytime, everywhere and anywhere is the only acceptable option.)

Another scary thing is that Chris Wade has found that other files in a projest get corrupted. Chris, does this occour in sheet sets or folders? Wondering what the relationship has to be for this to spread.

If this Big Friendly doesn’t come up with a quick cure, could you possibly send me one or more of the offending dwg files so that I can examine them and see what we may be facing and if there’s anything that we can do to help with this?

Thanks,

Chris