Author Topic: Possible bug?  (Read 7006 times)

Offline charlesteton

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Possible bug?
« on: September 09, 2011, 11:03:35 AM »
Hi Kirk,

Have you hear of a bug where if you ingest from cards that have a corruption at the end, i.e. silly me pulled the card before totally saving the last image, then PM will not allow me to properly cancel the ingest and the only way to ingest further or close PM is to force quit PM?

Many thanks and regards,

Charles

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2011, 11:14:24 AM »
Charles,

Have you hear of a bug where if you ingest from cards that have a corruption at the end, i.e. silly me pulled the card before totally saving the last image, then PM will not allow me to properly cancel the ingest and the only way to ingest further or close PM is to force quit PM?

No, I have not heard of that one before.  Is it reliably reproducible?  What does Ingest say or do that prevents you from cancelling?

-Kirk

Offline charlesteton

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2011, 11:30:27 AM »
> Is it reliably reproducible?

Yes

> What does Ingest say or do that prevents you from cancelling?

I'll get back to you but ingest shows that the ingest is not complete and you go to cancel which is fine but the window never shows that the ingest has cancelled and you can't quit because it says that its still ingesting!

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2011, 02:11:19 PM »
> Is it reliably reproducible?

Yes

> What does Ingest say or do that prevents you from cancelling?

I'll get back to you but ingest shows that the ingest is not complete and you go to cancel which is fine but the window never shows that the ingest has cancelled and you can't quit because it says that its still ingesting!

Given what you've said, I'd expect that when PM makes a call to the OS to copy the file and you've removed the card it hangs in the OS and as such the thread in PM cannot be stopped.  I don't think there is much we can do about an issue like this.

Is there a reason you're unceremoniously yanking the card out of your card reader during the Ingest?

-Kirk

Offline charlesteton

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #4 on: September 10, 2011, 09:45:43 AM »
Hi Kirk,

I don't think I made myself clear. The corrupt or incompletely written file, my thinking for the corruption, is done by the camera when I'm switching cards in the middle of a job. It happens maybe 1 in 6 cards, depending on the job. I would rather loose the last frame than possible loose an event I should have got but am messing about changing cards.

So, and I'm sure this did not happen with the last version, I'm running 4.6.7 on a Mac, PM does not let go of the card from the system and if I want to do anything else it lets me I need to stop the ingest, which I have tried to do many times. The only way to get out of the situation is to force quit PM. I leave the cards in the reader and never yank them out.

Hope this helps?

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #5 on: September 10, 2011, 10:58:48 AM »
Charles,

I don't think I made myself clear. The corrupt or incompletely written file, my thinking for the corruption, is done by the camera when I'm switching cards in the middle of a job. It happens maybe 1 in 6 cards, depending on the job. I would rather loose the last frame than possible loose an event I should have got but am messing about changing cards.

So, and I'm sure this did not happen with the last version, I'm running 4.6.7 on a Mac, PM does not let go of the card from the system and if I want to do anything else it lets me I need to stop the ingest, which I have tried to do many times. The only way to get out of the situation is to force quit PM. I leave the cards in the reader and never yank them out.

I understand now.  You're not pulling the card during Ingest.  PM is not able to progress in copying the images because the card is damaged.  PM makes calls to the OS to copy the files and if those calls never return then the thread cannot be stopped.  Thus you have to force quit PM.

I don't think I can offer a solution.

Just force quit PM.

-Kirk

Offline FVlcek

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #6 on: September 12, 2011, 11:57:14 AM »
Hi, any major reason you are still on OS X Leopard 10.5.8 ? Your MacBook Pro should accommodate at least Snow Leopard pretty easily, no? And it might be more mature in handling of corrupted cards. It might be too soon to upgrade to Lion, as it has caused some issues in PM which are AFAIK still being worked out (as Apple is quite known for silently dropping or changing system features software developers were using for years without so much prior notice in major releases), but being on OS two generations behind, when Snow Leopard alone costs just 29$, unless you depend on some other software which requires it, is not very sound. And Snow Leopard did have a lot of internal improvements over Leopard, more like a big service pack than a new release, polishing many things that were left unresolved in Leopard. Really, most of the added features in 10.6 over 10.5 were internal improvements. It might be quite possible that it will resolve your issue as well (not betting on it though  ;))

So I suggest you to upgrade the system, and maybe later, when it is known to be stable and bug free, upgrade to Lion as well.

Second, why not buy bigger cards? And both CF and SDHC, as you can use both inside all of your cameras.

Yanking a card out of camera while it is still writing might result in ALL photos getting lost, it happened to me few times. It is a not very safe bet, that you will loose only the last few yet unwritten photos. At the very least the card might be getting degraded and damaged over time. The flash controller inside the card is doing pretty complex things with the bits, it's NEVER a good thing to remove a card that is still being written to. Once I couldn't recover such damaged card even with PhotoRescue. The flash controller is doing such things as wear levelling all the time, so yanking it out during write might really affect all contents of it, making them unrecoverable. With cards so cheap, just why risk it... Unless it's like in our newspaper where they were very keen on cheaping out on cards ;-)

Offline charlesteton

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #7 on: November 19, 2011, 05:38:42 AM »
Hi Kirk,

Somehow you solved it with v4.6.8, now does as it used to and releases card etc.

Frantisek,

Thanks for your post. I've got two MacBook Pro's, one is up to date with the OS and a server. My main is on OS 10.5.8, I have too much software to do a big upgrade of everything especially when dare I say it everything is running sweat...

I'm not yanking out cards as they are being written, I've been watch myself and no flashing lamps indicating still writing still get an occasional file that is damaged or not completely written. I'll try and isolate the camera/cards etc as I have three bodies I use at the same time.

Thanks for your input. :)

Offline FVlcek

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #8 on: November 20, 2011, 03:59:54 AM »
Thanks for your post. I've got two MacBook Pro's, one is up to date with the OS and a server. My main is on OS 10.5.8, I have too much software to do a big upgrade of everything especially when dare I say it everything is running sweat...

I can understand that, upgrading a well running server is always a chore, why breaking something that works ;-)

Offline Hayo Baan

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #9 on: November 20, 2011, 08:51:11 AM »
I'm not yanking out cards as they are being written, I've been watch myself and no flashing lamps indicating still writing still get an occasional file that is damaged or not completely written. I'll try and isolate the camera/cards etc as I have three bodies I use at the same time.

Hi Charles,

Are you first "ejecting" the card in the OS (e.g., move it to the trash, or have PM automatically do that for you)? If not, you definitely should as even though you may not see any activity, it might be there's still some writes that need to be performed…

Hope this helps,
Hayo
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Web: www.hayobaan.nl

Offline Kirk Baker

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Re: Possible bug?
« Reply #10 on: November 20, 2011, 09:03:10 AM »
Charles,

Somehow you solved it with v4.6.8, now does as it used to and releases card etc.

No changes were made in Photo Mechanic version 4.6.8 regarding Ingest/Copy/Eject.  I'd suspect that some of your cards are going bad.  Make sure you format them in the camera when you reuse them.  The firmware is supposed to map off bad sectors/blocks so that failures don't continue to occur, but I suggest retiring a card whenever it appears to be going bad.

-Kirk