Audacity failed to read in from Drive D

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi all! I am a content creator that creates a podcast of approximately over 2 hours. I have poured my time and love into my work, and I put it everything on a hard drive. Sorry if this question has been answered, I’m just freaking out.

Lately, these past couple of weeks, I have been noticing an issue with my hard drive. The Hard drive works perfectly well outside of Audacity, however, it seems like multiple 2 hour long Audacity projects don’t load at all. Sy I copy the file to my local computer hard drive. Windows creates the error Can’t read from source file or disk. However, if I load Audacity it says that it “Audacity failed to read from a file in ”.

Audacity always struggles to load in gigantic files, and that’s understandable: loading in GBs of data understandably take time, but when it seem to be failing for every large file, I am really concerned. Smaller files seem to work so far in my tests.

I notice another forum on loading on using your audacity repair tool, but the steps to do that involve copying those files from my hard drive into a downloads folder and renaming it. However, since every transport from the hard drive to the computer always fails, I can’t use that work around. Or, at least, everything I’ve tried for that has failed.

I really hope years worth of work hasn’t been lost, and if there’s anything I can do to recover all of those countless hours, I would be much obliged.

I would also appreciate an understanding of how this problem might have arisen. The only thing think that could cause this might have been defragging and optimizing my hard drive, but computers do that all of the time on their own drives, I don’t think that would have caused the issue.

Thanks for your time,

2

Where is D:? Is it an external, USB, network, or cloud drive? Audacity doesn’t always get along with those very well.

If you close Audacity, can you move your work files from d:\ to c:? It’s not the worst idea to do all your active production and editing on your local drive c:, close Audacity and then move the files to other drives if you want to. Move the files back to c:\ before Audacity tries to open them.

It may seem that Audacity is being crazy particular about its drives, but it has to be. If you set up for multi-track overdubbing, for example, Audacity has to set the precision and timing of its production drive since it has to play and record at the same time. It can’t do that if you’re trying to do production on a cloud drive two time zones away with network retries, delays, re-routing, and error detection. Gotta be the local drive.

Koz

3



Are you trying to say that the hard drive works fine for everything except for Audacity, or
are you trying to say that the hard drive works fine for everything except for Audacity files.

This is an important distinction!

Let’s start at the beginning. What version of Windows are you running? What version of Audacity are you running?

If you are getting an error when you use Windows to copy an Audacity .aup3 project file to your local drive, then this is a Windows (or drive) problem which is not related to Audacity. It is no wonder then that Audacity would also complain about the same issue. How much free space do you have on your local drive?

However, if Windows can copy the project file to your local drive without an error and you have plenty of free space and you then get the stated Audacity error, it is then likely to be a corrupted file.

Perhaps you want to post a couple of screen shots?

4

Hey Koz, I can’t move the files from my hard drive because when I do so, it starts the transfer, but then it drops down to a few MBs. It is a 1TB physical hard drive and not a cloud Drive because I can’t store all of my audacity projects on a local machine. This hasn’t been an issue since Audacity 3.0

5

"Are you trying to say that the hard drive works fine for everything except for Audacity, or
are you trying to say that the hard drive works fine for everything except for Audacity files.

This is an important distinction!"

Indeed it is. The program, to my knowledge, seems perfectly fine. It seems like some of my larger Audacity files (close to 2 hours long) do not load in correctly.

I am on Windows 11 home right now, though, I have another computer on Windows 10. Audacity 3.1.3.

“If you are getting an error when you use Windows to copy an Audacity .aup3 project file to your local drive, then this is a Windows (or drive) problem which is not related to Audacity. It is no wonder then that Audacity would also complain about the same issue. How much free space do you have on your local drive?”

953 GBs on this current drive, but the same problem occurs even on my Windows 10 machine

However, if Windows can copy the project file to your local drive without an error and you have plenty of free space and you then get the stated Audacity error, it is then likely to be a corrupted file.

“Perhaps you want to post a couple of screen shots?”

A wise idea

So, here’s what I did. Yesterday the following issues were noticed when I
Picture A: couldn’t copy some files to the hard drive because it literally stops the transfer process
B: Couldn’t open in Audacity. Here it gives the below error
C: Yet some projects can copy over and open just fine

Error:
{
“timestamp”: 1662728452,
“event_id”: “2c55653895050449b392539523a07d0a”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.1.3”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.22000”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “File_Error”,
“value”: “Audacity failed to read from a file in .”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false,
“data”: {
“sqlite3.rc”: “10”,
“sqlite3.context”: “SqliteSampleBlock::Load::step”
}
}
}
]
}
}
Opening in audacity.png
audacity files able to be transfered from hard drive.png
one such file transfering it to the hard drive.png
one such file.png

6

The interesting thing is that these files were previously able to be used on the hard drive. I have made edits and saved them, and only recently I’ve begun to have issues

7

OK, so this means:

(10) SQLITE_IOERR
The SQLITE_IOERR result code says that the operation could not finish because the operating system reported an I/O error.

A full disk drive will normally give an SQLITE_FULL error rather than an SQLITE_IOERR error.

There are many different extended result codes for I/O errors that identify the specific I/O operation that failed.

A bad key or corrupted database can sometimes manifest as this error - so whenever we see this error, this is typically the cause. However, considering your other issues, I suspect you simply have a hardware issue that needs to be resolved.

Alright, let’s cut to the chase. If you can upload this file to a public file sharing service, then do so, preferably zipped. I’ll take a look at it and see whether or not your project is, in fact, damaged, and if anything can be done to rescue it.

If you cannot do this upload (or if you have errors during this upload), then you will need to have someone look into your machine and find out why.

8

Unfortunately, I am unable to move the file off of the external hard drive

9

Yes. So apparently you have a Windows or a hardware issue. :frowning: Perhaps you can find someone locally who can help you out. :smiley:

BTW, a copy would suffice.

10

How big are the files and how is your D drive formatted? It should be NTFS formatted to handle big files.

11

I’m much more interested in how you’re moving the files. Are you doing it in Windows or are you still trying to open remote files directly in Audacity? I’m looking for a Windows error, not an Audacity error.

If you do have a Windows error, then you have Windows or drive problems.

Yes, I know you can’t do massive productions directly on your internal drive, but you can do one show at a time and do shows in segments and move the segments on and off external drives for work with Audacity shut down.

Koz

12

It is NTFS formatted

13

I’m talking GBs of data.

14

I’m talking GBs of data.

Is the show so large that you can’t make a duplicate on a second drive for safety backup?

You may have produced yourself into a non-editable show.

If you’re on a Windows laptop and you’re doing all your work on a network drive somewhere in your building, then your setup is brittle. It’s a little better if it’s a USB drive on your desk, but in days gone by, the video people were urged strongly not to do production on USB drives because they were one-way streets. They would set up for reading data or recording data but not both. All you needed was one edit to catch the data management dance a little off rhythm and the edit would go right in the bin. Video and audio both work in real time. It’s not like a spreadsheet where it doesn’t matter if the calculations are a fraction of a second late.

Your setup isn’t broken. That would be easy. It’s unstable. It might fail this time…

As a fuzzy rule, drives get slower and sloppier as they fill up. That makes the chances of error go up as you approach the end of the show.

As I posted, Audacity always assumes a perfect connection to an internal drive. The further away from the machine the drive is, the more likely it is to create data errors. If you can’t break the show up into manageable chunks, then that may be the end of the world.

Koz

15

Would you recommend hour long chunks? If not hour long, then how big a chunk do you recommend?

MY data is held on a physical external hard drive, so yes, not internal. However, that has never been an issue before. The drive has seemingly worked perfectly fine. I put it on a hard drive because my machine couldn’t fit the files on the hard drive. Would it be a good idea to expand the hard drive if my machine still can’t fit all of the files?

Thank you all for your insight! I greatly appreciate your help

16

Hi all! If my files are recoverable, here’s what I had in mind before.

Since I can’t use my OS system to transfer the files, my plan was to have a professional, when I get back home from college, transfer the files to a new Hard drive. My original plan was another 1TB hard drive. The files take up approximately 800gbs of Data. Would a 2TB be better?

If this isn’t the way to go to recover my data and be able to maintain it in the long term, what is a better approach to getting my files back in an operable state? I don’t have a lot of money, so cost effective options are prefered.

Thanks!

17

To be clear, my External Hard drive is one that can connect to the computer via USB A and is not networked

18

Hi there - I know this is an old post but I’m having the exact same issue. My external drive is just a few months old. I’m getting this same random error every now and then and there seems to be no rhyme or reason. Were you able to figure this out?

19

Hi. Heaving the same problem with “full disk”. It started like 2 weeks ago… There was no update during this time. Doesnt metter what disk I use. I have for sure enought space in HDD and in RAM
Today audacity crashed completly and cannot do anything. Tried to reinstall, the same result.