About "Unknown System Error - Error downloading instrument "

[Casawave]

Hi !

I just want to share a tip I discover after several days of tests

I was in one of my customer studio to make a clean installation of his 7 computers to upgrade from Giga 2.54 to Giga 3, and use Fx teleport with all these computers.

On one of the four Gigastation, I had a mysterious random "Unknown System Error - Error downloading instrument" when I loaded I perfomance which was ok before.
Sometimes I was able to use 72% of the memory (2Gb in the computer), and sometimes I was getting the "Error downloading" message.

I tried to reinstall Giga, windows, change the memory preset ......and tried so many things I don't even remember (I lost a lot of hair during these days :rolleyes: )

One thing that help me to find the solution : When I move the Vsl library to an external hard disk, the error message disappear, and I was able to reach 72% of the memory each time.

So I made a complete format of the Library hard disk, move the library back to this hard disk, and now everything is ok !
Strange solution, but it works !
If it could help someone ...

[composerguy78]

Thanks very much!!! We're having that problem!!
Felix

[JonFairhurst]

I wonder if a low level scandisk would fix it as well. Maybe there were bad sectors on the disc that were avoided after the format.

[composerguy78]

HI Guys,
I have been searching all over this forum. The thing is, I am getting the same problem as in your threads, but here's my problem.

I get the "Error when downloading..." error message. However, it happens at 20% each time. Even changing the hardware configuration in the hardware setup does not affect this. Each time giving us the error message at around 20% even when the other machines we have get up to 67%.

Any ideas much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Felix

[dirk]

I was getting the same error - fairly randomly, sometimes stopping at as little as 15% of memory. Early on, while fighting this frustration, I found that once it started to throw these errors, there was nothing to do except reboot. I also found that I was less likely to get the error if I started GS immediately after a reboot.

The eventual fix was quite different than what Stéphane found: I re-installed Win XP from scratch, basically as a way of making sure that all of the c**p which was installed on the PC at the factory was removed. This worked wonderfully and I have never received this error since.

The range of randomness and fixes: reboot, re-install XP, move to external disk, points to something pretty low-level inside system resource allocation in XP.

I wish these errors were more instrumented, so that we could figure out what is really going on. Text like "Unknown System Error" is almost aprocryphal in Software Engineering circles. "Don't worry your pretty little heads about this, folks...."

--Dirk