Topic: Bad view of wlk file

[Cienega32]

Thru a series of events unrelated to WL, I ended up with a system lock up with nothing but desktop wallpaper but was able to 'task mgr' exit WL. From that point, WL would crash during the upload events. I ended up installing 5.8.2 (which I thought I had done already!) to no avail.

I tracked it down to whenever it generates any graphics for upload. Then to any graphic report. Then to the browse database function.

What I have is a browse display of only date and time of the archived data - no data. I'm assuming that whenever it tries to generate a graph or chart using that file, it crashes. Going into the edit screen of each record shows a full set of "clean" data values - it just doesn't display the headers or the values in the browse window.
 (NOTE: My rain database was also goofy but clicking "NEW" rebuilt it)

Ah HAH! GOT IT!  Deleting the two DAT files (DataSets & DataLists) in the station directory did the trick. Opening them up with notepad showed them to be empty, for some reason, but still proper size. Would've been nice if they had a zero file size...   Letting WL rebuild the structures to a pair of new files cleared it up. 

Soooo... if WL crashes after you totally whack out your system -
- check if it crashes during uploads or strip chart or plot displays
- 'browse' the database (notepad looking icon)
- if it shows only date and time, check an entry for data (double-click or go to edit)
- if data there, close WL and delete the two DAT files - "DataSets.dat"  & "DataLists.dat"


I composed this while I was checking a few last things before I found the problem but I'll post it in case someone else should ever get jammed on this...

EDIT: I forgot to mention that using the "Repair" feature of the 5.8.2 installer does not repair those files.

[SLOweather]

Thanks for posting this. A fellow Southwestern Weather Network member is having a similar issue. I passed the info on to her.

Chris

[Cienega32]

Chris - please post results. I'm curious to know if it helped her.

[ramandala]

Chris gave me the link to this thread and am I ever grateful!!!  I run www.GlendoraWeather.com and the graphs page uses WL graphs.  Every time it went to upload the graphs, it would crash.  This is the second time this has happened.  The first time Chris fixed it for me with a clean install of WL.  That lasted three months before it started up again.  Previous to that, WL ran for three years without a problem. 

So, I tried the tip about deleting the two files and for the first time in a month, I have current graphs!  Now, if it happens again, it will take me less than a minute to solve it.

I use VirtualVP, StartWatch and WD with WL.  This was happening on 5.7.1 and 5.8.? 

Thanks again!!!

Rachel

[Cienega32]

Outstanding!!! Glad it worked out!

It kicked me around for a few hours - backing up and deleting files, reinstalling, etc. etc. Quite perplexing.

I'm going to pass a note off to Davis about this, being I'm not the only one who was "victimized" by it.

[Rachel]

Thanks again!  I'll shoot a note off to Davis as well!
Rachel

[Cienega32]

Well, I passed on the details of the situation to Tech Support and received this stirring response:

Hello,

I'll forward your email to our suggestion department. Thank you for the feedback.

Larry Smith


And all this time I was looking at it as a bug report. Silly me!

[thalderman]

Great information ... I just ran into this same problem. Followed advice of first post - deleting the two files. It fixed my problem. Just an additional note ... I recently added StartWatch to my system. I noticed another poster mentioned using StartWatch. I wonder if it has something to do with the files getting corrupted. I haven't seen this before on my system ... been running for about 3 years now. I installed StartWatch a few days ago and walla ... it now is locked and has crashed with this issue. At least I know how to fix it now.

Thanks a bunch WXForum.net

[Cienega32]

My problem occurred months before I installed StartWatch and was the result of a system crash that "probably" occurred during the data file write.

Whether it's a rare anomaly with StartWatch & WL and sunspots or whatever - who knows but I do know that StartWatch has freed me from a lot of other aggravations since installing that gem of a utility.

[thalderman]

Glad to hear you are a believer in StartWatch. I am tired of WL locking up during the APRS transfer every few weeks - hoping StartWatch will fix the issue for me.