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Crash when opening a certain drawing in AutoCAD Products

Technical Support

Issue:

Users reported that when opening specific drawings files in AutoCAD products (including the Toolsets and Civil 3D) the program crashes, or occasionally it may freeze. The crash might also occur silently with no error message or a CER(customer error report) might appear.

Causes:

  • The drawing is corrupted.
  • An external reference (Xref) within the drawing is corrupted. 
  • Damaged or invalid objects.
  • Missing video card updates.

Solution:

Recover and repair the drawing

  1. Open a new blank drawing in AutoCAD.
  2. Enter RECOVER on the command line. If the drawing contains Xrefs, enter RECOVERALL.
    • If recovery completes without crashing, then it is possible to restore at least a portion of the drawing. See How to repair corrupt AutoCAD files.
    • If RECOVERALL causes a crash, then one or more Xrefs will need to be repaired separately.
    • If drawing cannot be recovered or repaired, the drawing information or file itself are damaged, and content will need to be restored from an existing backup or previously saved version. See Understanding backup and autosave files in AutoCAD.

When the file (that contains Xrefs) can be opened normally by other users

Reset the settings within the program:

  1. See Reset AutoCAD to default for steps.
  2. You will be given the option to save a copy of settings during the process. This is recommended.
  3. After the reset is complete, do not load, re-imported, or migrated the settings on the first start up.
  4. Decline this and test to see if the issue is still occurring, 
    • If not, this likely repaired the issue.
    • If it does, settings can be reloaded and further solutions can be applied.
      1. Open a new drawing inside the AutoCAD product and change the value for the following system variables: 
        • Enter XREFNOTIFY and change the value from 2 to 0 (zero).
        • Enter TRAYNOTIFY and change the value from 1 to 0 (zero).

When the DWT or DWG file can be opened normally by older versions but not by AutoCAD 2022 or later versions

Starting with AutoCAD products 2022, hardware acceleration has switched to DirectX 12. See AutoCAD 2022 Help | 3D Graphics Technical Preview (What's New in 2022).  If a file opens without issues in previous versions of AutoCAD products but does not open in AutoCAD 2022 products or later, consider the following :

Products:

AutoCAD Products;

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