Corrupt Session?

Last night I tried loading a session I've been mixing and it loaded up to a point where a trim plugin was being loaded, then just sat there "counting the fingers". I couldn't cancel it either, and had to reboot. I've never had this happen before. I kept trying earlier and earlier session backups (I set auto-backup for every ten minutes), rebooting each time it hung, but it kept stopped at the same place every time. I also trashed the DAE preferences and Digisetup twice, but that didn't help. I ended up having to use the final session from the night before, but lost a whole night's work. I presume the session got corrupted somehow. As I said, it's never happened before in almost two years of using PTLE, but what causes this and how can I prevent this from occuring again?

Have you tried running anything like Disk Doctor or anything similar (check for file corruption)??? I'd run whatever you have that's similar to view the report and see what it says. I know you know what you're doing lwilliam, but this sounds quite odd and I must admit I haven't heard of anything similar. Another thing, how long has it been since you defragged?

I haven't defragged in a month or so...I'll definitely add that to my list of to-do's tonight. I haven't done a sector-by-sector analysis with Norton (NDD, I think). I hope I don't have to, but I'll keep it in mind. Thanks. Anything else I might have stupidly (or NOT stupidly) forgotten?

lwilliam sorry I cant help ,but I have a question for you.I have a G4 400 with the stock 20 gig 5200 rpm drive and six sessions on it.I have read different stories on whether to defrag or not.After loading 5.1.1 I seem to be getting the drumming fingers alot when I hit record with eight or so tracks enabled.The stock drive worked fine before the 5.1.1 update,and still is ok except for the drumming fingers. I have cache set to 512,Low Lattency on and the session buffer set to 128. Also PT and DAE memory are set at 60K each.I plan on getting a 40 gig IDE drive soon. Ive heard people say they dump everything to one drive and reformat the other,but for now I would like to know what you use to defrag your drive.I think maybe my drive may just need some maintance to get rid of the start delay.Also I have set open ended record time to 1 hour.Should I maybe Partition my stock drive? Hope you solved your problem.Hope I havent opened a big can of worms here. Thanks, Brad.

Another thing to try, short of a clean install of everything, since it hangs while loading "trim", might be trashing it and dragging it back in from the install disk. I know it doesn't seem like any sort of fix (and if it does, I'd use Disk First Aid immediately) but it might possibly be that the individual plug is corrupted (I'll admit, I'm reaching, but we all know what a hassle it is re-installing everything). Good Luck

Thanks. I don't think it's a corrupt plugin or it would have hung even on the previous night's session. Maybe it was just a fluke... Having an open-ended record time of an hour will definitely make for a delay when you record-enable several tracks. I keep mine set to 8 minutes, I believe. It takes the OS longer to "gather up" the disk space to allocate 8 x 1 hr (or however many tracks) than 8 x 8 minutes. Partitioning will help. Getting a 2nd hard drive would definitely help.

Thanks for the tip.I may have set open end record to 10 min. a while back and forgot allready! Ill check when I get in the studio.Ill also search the forum for "Defrag" T hanks again. Brad. P.S. Hey DIGI any known bugs with the Trim plug?

I take it that you're up and running now lwilliam. And yes, more HD's are always welcome (at least that a I've noticed )

I have found that running NDD two or three times in a row sometimes keeps finding more errors. Disk First Aid seems to be less useful.

Yep. Norton Disk Doctor DID find some errors on the partition where I had the session stored. Most of yesterday was spent running NDD and Speed Disk on all of my partitions. Things are getting back to normal .