please help! emergency!!! (crrashed ProTools won't restart)

[MDog]

I have to tell you, I'm not experiencing any of the problems you are listing here. It's not a common complaint with other users either, at least in this forum. How do you come to the conclusion that it's a "bug" in Pro Tools?

Pro Tools can be a bit tricky to configure. That's an undisputed fact.

[Ghengis]

Just looking through, nowhere have you listed your pc specs... is it a new system? or is it an older system? Maybe this could help?

[nonsqtr]

Hi all - about the backup, "understood". I was just about ready to get there. This is a new system and I'd just "almost" gotten done configuring it the way I wanted (added a terabyte of disk space, that kind of thing), so I figured I'd configure it and then back it all up. Only trouble is, I couldn't resist using ProTools in the meantime.....

About the systen, it's a top-of-the-line machine, custom built from the ground up. It does superbly in all the Sandra benchmarks, in the top one percentile on everything but the video, and that's because I have the extended video turned off ('cause DigiDesign asked me to). On the disk performance it does about 8:1 over standard ATA. Really, it's a mondo machine, it's all decked out. It has a blazingly fast bus and 2 gigs of RAM and dual Xeon's and all that. I "could" turn on the extended video features and let my video card bus-master at the same time ProTools is trying to bus-master, and I intended to go through that exercise once ProTools is up and running again, to see which way is faster/better/whatever, but first things first.

About the "localizing the bug" thing, my buddy Mike came over this morning with a hardware PCI analyzer, and in combination with some of my software tools we were looking at the PCI bus to try to see what's going on, and we got as far aw verifying that everything coming down to the disk is a legitimate IRP. The thing that was surprising, was that there's a lot of video activity. Something is trying to redraw. So, we found this one particular ProTools session, that comes up very slowly, and sure enough, the spike in CPU and PCI bus activity exactly coincides with the first incidence of "building edit window". But to answer the question, we did a complete hardware diagnostic on the machine. Started by stripping it and re-seating "everything". Then ran a series of diagnostics using a DOS-booted diskette (ie without Windows) just to test the hardware, and that passed okay, and then we ran a whole slew of tests inside Windows, to test the base hardware, the PCI bus, the CPU and memory, the disks, and the video, and all that passed okay. The tests included both benchmarks and stress tests, and if anything was going to crash the system, or put it into one of its "wierd states", this would have done it. Then finally, we verified that all the other programs are working, and as far as we could tell at the end of the day, ProTools is the only thing that doesn't work.

Regarding the DigiDesign hardware, the only thing I have to test it with is the DigiTest program, and that passes fine. It correctly tests all three cards, runs through all the tests on each one, and reports that each one is behaving acceptably.

So, I am right now as we speak, about ready to re-install ProTools. If after re-installation, the software has the same problem and behaves exactly the same way, then I will obviously eat my words (and probably cough up a few hundred bucks for DigiDesign tech support, till we figure out what part of my system went belly-up). But I have "good confidence" at this point, that ProTools will come back after a re-install.

So, I'll post back after however many hours it takes to do all this, un-install and then re-install and then check stuff out and then see if I can open a session.....

[nonsqtr]

Found the problem. It appears I lost an Accel card, and it took out ProTools with it.

I have PCI-x, Core-Accel-Accel, and it's the middle Accel card - the instant the first plug-in gets initialized on that card, the whole system goes nuts.

Verified, by switching cards 2 and 3, then removing card 3. The system works fine that way. (That is to say, it STARTED working fine that way, after re-installing ProTools).

So, my best guess, is that the Accel card went belly-up, and for whatever reason it took out a part of ProTools with it.

WELL..... (puts on best Lucille Ball accent)..... I suppose that's forgivable. A hardware failure is usually so catastrophic that there's hardly any way to have the software deal with all possible modes of that. And losing an Accel card would (hopefully) be expected to be "very rare".

So, after all is said and done, the only thing I could have wished for is that DigiTest would have told me that the card is flaky. I"m not sure how much of the SRAM is tested with DigiTest, or how extensively it's tested, but the card clearly works "up to a point" ('cause it has the mixer plug-in loaded into it even on small projects), and this set of symptoms would probably be consistent with a bad segment of SRAM.

BUT - in response to the post I "replied" to - yes, it is certainly true that ProTools involves some esoteric knowledge. I'm not sure "why" that should be, exactly, 'cause this is the kind of thing that you want to open up - I mean, from a corporate standpoint - that way, you can get your customers to do your debugging for you. (Microsoft is really good at that, and I'm surprised that this viewpoint hasn't filtered down into DigiDesign's business model).

The reason I say that, is, that if I were any less versed with computers, I probably couldn't have debugged this problem. I would have been pulling my hair out for days, trying to re-install ProTools in a gazillion different ways, until finally I probably would have given up. So, what would I have done in that case? Gotten a field-service guy for two hundred bucks an hour? Who would have taken an entire day just to figure out my system configuration (and then probably corrupted it in the process of "fixing" ProTOols)?

Hmmm.... well, while it's true that "most" people will (hopefully) never encounter problems like this, it would REALLY help if some of these little things were documented, or.... how shall I say.... "more accessible?".... Like that stupid sync thing, that cost me two whole days to figure out, and I had to do it all by myself, and that particular tidbit is SO important that it's probably a major oversight on Digi's part.... and in the case of the hardware, just a list like "here's some of the ways your hardware can fail on you"..... I mean, that's important when your "hardware" isn't just one unit, but it's an integrated system with three cards in the backplane and an outboard processor and so on.... otherwise, how are you going to tell what the heck is going wrong?

"Most" people, at the end of all this, would probably be left with the inkling that it's "some kind of hardware problem" - and THEN what do they do? Send all their cards up to Digi to get 'em tested? I'm just wondering.... Hmmm.... yeah, it could be kind of a nighmare when a hardware problem occurs on a system like that, eh?

Well, what the hey. Maybe I can make a living as a "Pro Tools consultant" when this is all over and I'm ready to retire.

Anyway, I'm very relieved that a) the problem is diagnosed, and b) the system is up and running, and c) none of the session data got lost in the process. I'm also very grateful for your help and input, it keeps me thinking and pushing on the envelope of possibilities.

So, um.... how do I get an Accel card fixed?