What to do in a Fatal Error Situation.

Noooooooooo!!!!

Hello fellow CAD Station readers!

I recently had an interesting situation where AutoCAD 2017, would crash at random times while working.  It didn't matter if I was in a huge 3D drawing or a simple 2D drawing.  It didn't matter what command I was using either.  I could be saving and it would crash out or I could be choosing the line command and BAM.!  Goodbye!  Thank you for playing.  

1. So the first thing to do is to not panic.  Hopefully you saved recently and if not, your backup is readable or for instance, in AutoCAD, you have the Recover Manager working for you.
2. The second thing to do is to observe what is going on with the machine.  Is it failing on 1 command?  Is it failing on only 1 drawing?  Is something else failing as well?
3. Once you determine what is going on, you can then start to formulate your attack plan on how to fix this failure.

For me, the failures varied all the time while I worked and not for the same file.  Also, whenever I crashed, it would generate a dump file and send info off to Autodesk.  When I read the dump file, it would always show the same thing failing: AcadDM13.hdi  If you don't know how to read a dump file, please click this link here: HOW TO READ A DUMP FILE.

Rut Roh!  Google knows nothing!

Looking at google found nothing for this error code or for AcadDM13.hdi.  I was starting to get worried as when you do a google search and it says, I don't know what you're talking about, you know you're in for some trouble.  

I was busy at work though and this crash would happen at random so I just ignored it and saved constantly.  I would always save the crash report when it happened though and make sure to send it off to Autodesk so they had a list of every time I crashed.  If you're not sure what that crash report does, please click this link:  DOES ANYONE READ MY CRASH REPORT?

It wasn't until recently that I installed an update to Adobe Photoshop in the morning and AutoCAD 2017 would not let me in.  It would go through the License verification, open up, but I could not click on anything.  I also noticed that the Lotus Notes I had open was not working as well.  Very curious.  It was now or never to fix this issue.

So, this was the fault of something other than AutoCAD.  I looked at the AVG antivirus and checked out the Reports and noticed that it was stuck on an update and the last time it did a scan was March 2016.  It was now November 2016.

So I called my IT dept and they uninstalled AVG and reinstalled it.  The install bar stalled while reinstalling.  So we halted installation, restarted the PC, then retried the install for AVG.  It luckily worked this time.  We then had to reinstall the Firewall portion of it as it did not go through.  Once that was reinstalled I was able to start AutoCAD 2017 but I had lost my network connections.  We went back into AVG and clicked on Firewall and noticed that it did not allow File and Printer Sharing.  Once activated, everything works fine.

AVG Antivirus Firewall Fire and Printer Sharing ON!

So if things go bad and you're not sure what's going on.  First take a look at your system.  Is everything opening as it should?  Has Windows updates stalled and didn't go through.  Did Antivirus block something or get stuck in my case.

I hope this helps everyone else that has had a similar situation as me.

If you have any questions, please comment and I'll help as best as I can.

Best of Luck!

Kevin Land