Stack Always Crashes LC On Save

[WaltBrown]

I have a stack I've been working on for a few days. Today, more than half the time I tried to Save the stack, LC freezes, leaving a corrupted stack, and an old backup version. This happens on 5.5.5, 6.0.2, and 7.0.3. Looking at the corrupted stack in Notepad++, all the scripts are present, but they are the old versions (from before today) - all new work is lost and none of the field content (old or new) is present. It just happened 5 times in a row.

I made copies of the stack, renamed them, etc. It seems to happen if I 1) open a stack, 2) drag a button on it from the toolbar, then 3) Save. If I click it, all the stacks go faded white. If I click again I get the dialog box "Livecode has stopped working". The stack in question has one field on the card with 36000 short lines of text in it. It's been saving fine the last few days.

After making copies, renaming them, moving to new areas of the disk, etc, the problem went away (about 6 Saves have succeeded). Now it has started again.

I can't find a pattern of what I am doing that starts this happening. It's a great bit annoying - I can work, but I'm saving every couple lines of code, and then every 5-6 Saves have to quit, shuffle and copy files around, and start again.

Any thoughts? I can't work very well this way

Arrrgh! Now it's happening if I Save without making any changes at all.

[jacque]

Some diagnostic things I'd try:

Delete most or all of the text. If the problem goes away, something in the text is bad.

Run a diagnostic check on your hard drive.

[WaltBrown]

Thanks Jacque. I stripped out all the field contents, and it continued to crash. I would have liked to find out the footprint of the crash, but instead I stripped out all my scripts with a hex editor, deleted all the offending stacks, and started a new stack from scratch. So far no crash. I'm saving every small change and adding field contents incrementally in case it shows up again. I was hoping someone had some clues toward a possible footprint.
Walt

[ghettocottage]

also, try saving to a different disk/usb drive/flash card/network drive anything but the same hard drive.


If saving it to a different location seems to solve it, then you will want to investigate your hard drive (for many reasons)

[WaltBrown]

Thanks, gc. I've been bitten by that more than once.

I remember my first hard drive - 3 rack modules high, about 50 pounds, dual drives of a whopping 2 MB each, $4500 in early 80's! The bad blocks had to be manually mapped periodically since new ones showed up every couple months. RT-11 had to pretend it was a 9 track drive...

Uh oh, crotchety old fart alert...

[FourthWorld]

It may be useful to extend Jacque's suggestion next by trying the removal of imported images.

[WaltBrown]

Thanks Richard, I'll keep that in mind for next time. This stack only had two text fields, one card, and a pretty hefty set of text parsing functions in the stack script. I'm chalking it up for now to a stray neutrino since my new stack has saved successfully 30-40 times so far.

[dunbarx]

If you really have two "essentially" identical stacks, where one is stable and the other is reliably unstable, I bet the team in Scotland would like to see both.

Craig Newman

[WaltBrown]

Thanks Craig, I hadn't thought of that. I'll see if I can put the two together.

[WaltBrown]

Craig, I seem to have lost whatever it is, partially. I still crash on demand in 5.5.5 and 6.6.2 with the stack in question, but I no longer crash on save in 7.0.3 or 8.0. If it becomes a problem again in the later versions of LC, I'll revisit this.