New Problems with Lightroom 4

[David Eichler]

Within the past few days the following problems have arisen, which I have not seen before with either LR3 or LR4. When I am done editing a file in Photoshop and try to save back to LR, I get a message that it can't be saved due to disk error. However, when I do a save as, it saves back to LR okay. And, I am getting corrupt previews of a few files, as well as corrupt rendering when I export or try to edit in LR. No problem with the original RAW file on the Flash card. I can delete the file from LR and reimport it and it is okay then. Usually the corrupt preview does not appear immediately, but changes from a good one to a corrupt one after some editing. Any ideas?

I still have LR3 on my machine, so it is back to that until this is resolved.

[Richowens]

Get a new hard drive.

Rich

[Schewe]

...I get a message that it can't be saved due to disk error.

Uh...if you are getting errors about your disk, I would suggest you start looking real hard at your disks...how old are they, have you had any other OS or system level problems or issues? LR isn't really capable of corrupting raw files since the ONLY time it writes to a raw file is if you specifically write capture time changes in the raw file, have you done that? If you are getting error messages in Photoshop and raw files getting corrupted in LR, I'm thinking it may be time to think about new hardware...

[David Eichler]

Uh...if you are getting errors about your disk, I would suggest you start looking real hard at your disks...how old are they, have you had any other OS or system level problems or issues? LR isn't really capable of corrupting raw files since the ONLY time it writes to a raw file is if you specifically write capture time changes in the raw file, have you done that? If you are getting error messages in Photoshop and raw files getting corrupted in LR, I'm thinking it may be time to think about new hardware...

Even though I can edit just fine with LR3 and the same edition of PS that I have been using with LR4 (CS5) without problems? And, re. the problem with PS and LR4 (that is, saving back to LR after editing in PS), always saves just fine when I do a save as (that is, whenever I get the error message and have to do that). It is only sometimes when doing the normal save that I get the message. Plus, the saved as file performs just fine after that. Also, not getting the corrupted view in LR3. Is LR4 just more sensitive to hard drive deterioration?

[Richowens]

David,
LR4 seems to stress hardware more than 3 did. Personally I would replace the drive.
Intermittent errors are an indication things are failing inside.

Rich

[David Eichler]

David,
LR4 seems to stress hardware more than 3 did. Personally I would replace the drive.
Intermittent errors are an indication things are failing inside.

Rich

Aha. These photos are on a brand new Seagate external drive. So, maybe a defective one. Or, could it be something to do with the application software on the internal drive, which is about 3 years old at this point and has seen moderately hard regular professional use.

[Hans Kruse]

Aha. These photos are on a brand new Seagate external drive. So, maybe a defective one. Or, could it be something to do with the application software on the internal drive, which is about 3 years old at this point and has seen moderately hard regular professional use.

I don't think so. But check your drives with the disc tool in your OS. I had an issue with a FW external disc with my MacBook Pro from 2009 where after some time I would have a partly corrupted disc which sometimes could be repaired and sometimes not. I had a suspicion that the FW could be the culprit since I got a new FW drive which had the same behavior. I then reformattted the drive and restored from my backup(s) and used the USB 2 interface on the drive instead and since i had no problems. It's now more than a month since I did this change and no problems. Maybe not your problem, but I thought I would tell the story anyway

[David Eichler]

I don't think so. But check your drives with the disc tool in your OS. I had an issue with a FW external disc with my MacBook Pro from 2009 where after some time I would have a partly corrupted disc which sometimes could be repaired and sometimes not. I had a suspicion that the FW could be the culprit since I got a new FW drive which had the same behavior. I then reformattted the drive and restored from my backup(s) and used the USB 2 interface on the drive instead and since i had no problems. It's now more than a month since I did this change and no problems. Maybe not your problem, but I thought I would tell the story anyway

I check the internal HD of my iMac with Apple Hardware test software. I checked the Seagate external HD with Seagate's HD test software. I also ran repair disk permissions on the internal drive and repair disk on the external drive. The test software indicated that both drives are okay. Also, the Apple test software indicated no problems with any other hardware.

[dreed]

For folks that are worried about hard disks failing, using a tool that monitors SMART information can help.

For Mac OS/X, something like this:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smartreporter/id509148961

On Windows machines, I use ActiveSMART:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/Active-SMART.shtml

[David Eichler]

Well, the problem I described above (saving files after editing in Photoshop) has gone away. However, LR4.2RC seems to be getting more sluggish. Also, I have the impression that other programs are running sluggishly when LR4 is open, even if it is idle and there is sufficient free RAM. Is this possible or am I just imagining it? It has come to the point where LR4 is unusable to me for production work, and I have gone back to LR3 for that. It took until version 3.5 for LR 3 to work smoothly for me. I hope that LR4 will eventually get there.

By the way, does anyone still think the hard drive might be an issue? With a 3 year old drive, should I just replace it regardless, to be on the safe side?

[degrub]

Keep your backups current !

[adamideas]

Back up everything right now. 

I have a seagate external drive and sometimes it takes minutes to save a simple file because the darn thing has gone to sleep and seems to take forever to wake up.  Until I figured out this is what was happening I was terrified that my drives were going bad and I'd loose everything. 

Just to be safe, back everything up 

[leuallen]

adamideas

There should be a utility you can install for the Seagate drive with which you can set sleep to "never". I think its called Dashboard and was on my drive. It drove me crazy until I installed this.

Larry