HDR Merge hanging

[dmstraker]

When I've an HDR Merge going on, I tend to head off to do other things. However, when I do this there's a tendency to come back later and the merge has frozen. Task Manager is then needed to kill AP.

I'm guessing it's a memory-intensive activity (it clearly uses lots of processor cycles) and may be hitting the out-of-resource buffers. Still, it's pretty untidy just to hang.

[Mark Ingram]

Is it still working? i.e. is CPU usage above zero?

[dmstraker]

I would check, but I've now got an unusable desktop system (writing this on portable) following the latest HDR crash.

AP was hanging or crashing the computer every couple of merges (memory leak?). Five 42 Mpx RAW images (40Mb each). Not much else going on (browser open).

Now, the computer won't boot. There's power and it all seems happy -- except nothing appears on either display. I've hard rebooted and fully power cycled several times. F8 at startup has no effect so I'm wondering if it's something to do with the monitor system. I've tried unplugging and plugging in monitor cables to no avail. But then pressing the power switch on the desktop results in an immediate power down, suggesting the system is stuck somewhere near the beginning of the boot sequence. The disk system is on RAID and reported health disks in a recent analysis.

Any ideas?

----

Edit: I gave it a while for capacitors to discharge and tried again. Now the computer's working again. Phew!

[emmrecs01]

@dmstraker

I feel your pain (not that that is of any help to you) but do you have any recent back-ups of your main system drive that you could install?

I ask because something very similar happened to me very recently.  In my case, the attempted uninstall of an older version of my pdf editor, PDF Xchange, led to a non-booting system, not good!  One of my deepest fears is of that type of occurrence, hence I regularly make automated back-ups of my main system and data drives.  For this I run Paragon Hard Disk Manager, and it includes a boot rescue disc.  Simply inserting that during another attempted boot-up loaded the drivers for the app and allowed me to reload the most recent full back-up, created some three days earlier.  Needles to say, perhaps, during the (fairly) lengthy process of the reload I was biting my nails rather furiously!

Jeff

P.S.  I almost feel that what I've written might be akin to "rubbing salt into the wound" but I really do hope you are able to resolve your situation. 

[dmstraker]

24 minutes ago, emmrecs01 said:

@dmstraker

I feel your pain (not that that is of any help to you) but do you have any recent back-ups of your main system drive that you could install?

I ask because something very similar happened to me very recently.  In my case, the attempted uninstall of an older version of my pdf editor, PDF Xchange, led to a non-booting system, not good!  One of my deepest fears is of that type of occurrence, hence I regularly make automated back-ups of my main system and data drives.  For this I run Paragon Hard Disk Manager, and it includes a boot rescue disc.  Simply inserting that during another attempted boot-up loaded the drivers for the app and allowed me to reload the most recent full back-up, created some three days earlier.  Needles to say, perhaps, during the (fairly) lengthy process of the reload I was biting my nails rather furiously!

Jeff

P.S.  I almost feel that what I've written might be akin to "rubbing salt into the wound" but I really do hope you are able to resolve your situation. 

Thanks, Jeff. Though as edit  above, I left it for a while and it rebooted ok. I read that this gives time for the capacitors to fully discharge and so let voltages drop to fully zero.

I have RAID on the desktop and backup to a Synology NAS system so I wouldn't lose much data (though the hassle of a dead system is counted in days, at least).

[dmstraker]

I also just had the same effect going to the tone mapping persona.

I suspect it's simply untidy handling when AP runs out of windows resources or is left waiting. I've not had the same issues with any other programme. Is there some kind of vector you can hook when windows says 'no'? and then unreel rather than just sitting and waiting? Maybe some kind of timeout interrupt that says 'It's taking a long time -- do you want to give up or keep waiting'?