Error reading from file

Question

Hello,

I just now started using Visual Source safe. due to some problem VSS Server was down. so client machine started getting error: "Error reading from file".

When we clicked on Help button it displays because of network connection failure it happened. so i restarted VSS.

But still i am not able to view any files in Source safe. When i open VSS it displays same error: "Error reading from file".

Can anyone tell why this happened?

Dhirendra.

Answer 1

When the VSS Server is down, the SourceSafe UI cannot read the information it needs to run properly.

You should stop seeing that error once your SourceSafe server is available again.

-Alfredo

Answer 2

I often encounted this problem too. Once the error occured, it always stopped at the same folder. I don't think this is the network problem. This error always happens when I fetching data from a particular label. If I use "Get latest" instead, there is no problem.

The help button for this particlar error is not help at all.

Answer 3

Have youre administrator run  the Analyze tool on your database. It turns out that VSS seems to like to corrupt its quite often.

Answer 4

Hi Marc,

 

For your information i also having this kind of problem.

Luckily we stil have a backup from previous days from server. But the backup contains all olders codes (basically 2 days old) rather the latest one.

The developers had to re-doing their coding again.

I did the research regarding the problem, asking wether the machine that holding the VSS is having a connection problem or not. For your information, the machine that holding the VSS has never reset the connection. Should be fine and OK.

I also pointing to the correct path of the srcsafe.ini file.

My research saying that this problem causes of by there's a Names.dat file in VSS is corrupted. And to repair this file, need to run the Analyze with minus F. Which i already did (Analyze -F path_to_data_folder)

The weird thing is, when i did a Analyze -F upon the corrupt database, it solve the problem where I can access the VSS without any error prompt up.

But when i open the VSS, i cannot see any data inside. But the file structure is still there. What should i do?

Answer 5

Rizwan (owangecounty), I think your problem may have been that your names.dat was corrupt or completely missing. "Analyze -f" probably did its best to recover the names, but may have failed. It's a bit strange that all files appear with empty names - normally when long names from names.dat are lost, analyze should be able to recover at least 31 characters from the real filenames (because names truncated to 31 characters are also stored in the data files). The best way for you to fix the problem is probably to call PSS (and it might help if you have a backup copy of names.dat before you started playing with analyze)

Dhirendra, your problem is different from Rizwan. Alfredo is right; if the connection to the server goes down, VSS will display errors like "Error reading from file", "Invalid file handle", etc. They will normally go away if you restart VSS after reestablishing the network connection.  If VSS client could not complete writing a file in the database when the network went down, your database may be corrupted. It is recommended to run analyze on the database to check the integrity of the data and fix potential problems.

LZF - you seem to already have corruption in the database (it sounds to me that you have corruption in the diff-chains of a file, or in the history entries of a folder). As Mark suggests, you should run analyze -f to fix the corruption.

Alin

Answer 6

Hi,

I am getting an error "Error reading from file" when i am trying to give access to a person to a particular folder in VSS, and  i tried to go to that folder from VSS client, the folder is empty the earlier files kept are missing, please advise the corrective action of this.

Regards

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Feroz Ahmed