I've got Bryce 5, bought it about 2 years ago (I think) and I've suddenly started having 'generic errors' crop up when I'm trying to save.  Whether images or materials, same thing.  Done a bit of searching for a patch or whatever today and not had any luck.

I can do the 'save image as' but I'm losing out on some cool materials I made this morning, as well as some good 'setups' for future work!

Help?

How's you're hard drive? Not getting filled up? Maybe the hard drive needs to be defragged.

--Death_at_Midnight

Quote - How's you're hard drive? Not getting filled up? Maybe the hard drive needs to be defragged. --Death_at_Midnight

 

Just defragged a couple of days ago - moved many old files onto my removable driv, so the main hard drive on this computer has MORE free space than it has in awhile.  Seems like this has happened before, then stopped on its on.  Wish I had the spare cash to upgrade to 5.5!

Install the latest update for Bryce 5.0;

http://www.daz3d.com/support/downloads.php?product=bryce

(nearest the bottom)

Quote - Install the latest update for Bryce 5.0;

http://www.daz3d.com/support/downloads.php?product=bryce

(nearest the bottom)

slaps forehead in disgust  Honest, I did go to that site and all I saw was link after link about version 5.5 (which I wish I could upgrade to!).  Thank you SO much - I did a test save and did NOT get that blasted error this time!

Back to making pretties - woo hoo!

Dee (aka cherokeeheart)

Well, my peace of mind didn't last long.  The error is back, so I'm open to suggestions here!  I've run defrag again, rebooted a couple of times, ran the antivirus program, ran AdAware and am at a loss as to what to do next.

I am serioucly going thru Bryce withdrawals!  LOL

Dee aka cherokeeheart

....hmmmmm.

What I would try is uninstalling the whole thing (back up any mats first), re-installing, applying latest patch, and see if that has any affect. I know sounds stupid, but computers mostly are.

It's strange that these errors are suddenly happening. I would try and think about what programs have been installed as of late.

I would make sure my OS was updated.

I would start talking to my PC, try to reason with it...cleans its monitor and dust its keyboard....

"I would start talking to my PC, try to reason with it...cleans its monitor and dust its keyboard...." Quote from Agent Smith.

Then drop kick the whole thing into the nearest body of water. Take a good holiday to some place relaxing. Come back save up for a new computer but instead use the money as a deposit on a nice new VESPA.

My Sata drive with about 150  gigs of graphics programs, animation files, models and textures is no long detected by my motherboard.

I feel your pain.  

too many files in a particular library? I seem to remember having a problem with that some time ago. I ended up just making more categories so no one section got too large. Don't remember if this related to your problem or not it was in the long ago even before Darth Bikermouse was summoned from the far away to attend one of Doctor Geeps lectures on Poser Four(or was that Tantalus Five?) and yes it was even before Rochr was discovered to have tenticles and bryster beat drac(according to bryster) in the Crystal Palace Challenge it was even before the bikermouse recieved ...  but I digress. I think I even had to reinstall Bryce

I'm curious... how old is the hard drive? I'm thinking if it's not an issue with too many opened libraries, maybe it's something else, something physical. Maybe bad sectors. Hard drives experience a lot of wear and tear.....

--Death_at_Midnight

I mentioned about bad sectors b/c some time ago I had a similar problem where one of the objects I was using got glitched somehow and would always generate an error during save, usually crashing Bryce in the process. Through process of elimination I figured what object it was. Further testing showed it was on an area of the hard drive with a bad sector. So the object got glitched.

Since hard drives do have an operational life of a few years, and they do get very hot, and it depends what material and special coatings cover the platters, I'm wondering if that's the problem. But I wouldn't be amazed if it was something like too many libraries opened or some program running that's generating conflict. I'm interested to know what the cause is.

--Death_at_Midnight

Well you could run chkdsk (XP) if you think that it's a bad sector. Seriously though unless you're running under extreme conditions you let your cooling system go to pot or the drive is old it's not as likely as a software problem. another thing that can cause strange problems is if the cmos battery goes out. you should replace those every year or two.Crazydawg had a powersource go out which as you might imagine could cause any type of symptoms but again if the power supply is not overloaded, overheated, overused or otherwise abused - not too likely.

It's not one of those ol' "Filename exceeds 32 characters" type errors is it? I remember that can cause problems in Bryce.

Okay, we have talked to the PC (we tried to limit the number of cuss words we used in the process LOL), ran chkdsk (while hubby sat there and babysat the process) and before THAT I deleted quite a few materials and imported/created objects from my libraries.

chkdsk found no bad sectors and once my geeky hubby finally gave me permission to touch my computer again, Bryce SEEMED to be working properly.  Of course, now he's worried I may have accidentally deleted something important but I swore to him that all I deleted were mats and imported objects, so I should be okay there, right?

sigh  I'm geekier than I was seven years ago, but I'm still not good with the technical end of things!  Anyway, I'll let you know how Bryce is functioning after I've had some time to play with it a bit more.

Thanks to AgentSmith, bikermouse and Death_at_Midnight for all your technical help.  And a big thanks to cyba-storm for a much needed chuckle!

Dee aka cherokeeheart

Interesting about the CMOS battery: one of those went out on me three years ago. Windows started complaining about hard drive failure. A few reboots later the battery was too weak to keep the BIOS settings and soon DOS prompt came up complaining about no boot device. Personally I don't think the problem is the battery, but a computer is a complex machine, so I wouldn't be too amazed if it actually is a battery problem.

It was a new motherboard, but I guess the battery that came with it was not. Probably sat on the shelf somewhere with thousands of other batteries before being used in that motherboard. I'm not that familiar with battery failures. Another thought comes to mind could be RAM... I've had strange things happen with mixed RAM manufacturers, heat of the computer, and internal clock all working together to go crazy at 2:41 AM every night.

I agree, though, it could be a software problem. But we'll need more information... such as what was the last software installed? Any malware? Has anyone else come up wth this problem? Is it just for this one particular project that makes this error, or any project being saved? etc. But without additional information, and from my own trouble with a glitched object, I'm thinking physical.

--Death_at_Midnight

Great! So far! I hope it was something as simple as that!!  It's great to be wrong about some things. Hard drives can cost a lot of money that should be spent on more important things, like on Bryce 6. I hope that was the solution. Congrats!

I'm starting a thread asking about Bryce's limits....

--Death_at_Midnight