all of my custom hatch patterns have disappeared... now what?

I have NO EARTHLY CLUE what I have done now to lose all of my custom hatch patterns. I keep digging into the Autocad files on my comp and can only find one .pat file.

Any ideas or suggestions would sure be very much appreciated right about now!!!

Where were they to begin with? Did you keep them separate from acad.pat or did you append them to that file?

What had you been mucking around in prior to losing your custom hatch patterns? Were you making some customizations? Did you reinstall AutoCAD?

I haven't made any changes to my normal program operations, no re-installs, etc.

They were buried in a folder with the path of: C:\Users\mareber\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2011\R18.1\enu\Support

Now, all I see in that folder is acad.pat.

In other words it was a separate .PAT file then correct?

I don't know if an entire PAT file has gone missing that contained the hatch patterns OR if all of the .pat hatches were in the same Support folder.

How could this have happened?

The ONLY thing I have done differently recently- about a month ago, was to open another 2014 .dwg to work on that was saved for my 2011 program.

I have gone back through old drawings that show the hatches, but cannot see the custom hatch choices any longer when I click on hatch edit.

So it seems to be a total CAD thing rather than a particular drawing thing.

Did you search your entire hard drive for files ending in the .PAT file type?

Brilliant! I was able to find 2 of the gazillion I had before, but fortunately, for the job I am dead lining on, I needed one that I found. I just copied and pasted it into the support folder, and it showed up in the custom choices after that.

Now, is there a way to do a more specific search on the hard drive that does not bring up EVERYTHING that contains the letters PAT?

Yes and it is something you should know how to do already....use a wildcard like this: *.PAT

Whatever gave you the idea that I would know how to do ANYTHING already?

Thank you, I'll try that now.

Everyone who uses a computer should know how to search using wildcards. It is a useful skill to know.

Thanks ReMark,

I was able to find just the two .pat hatches after redoing the *.PAT search on my entire hard drive... but I still have no clue as to what may have happened to all of the rest of my hatch patterns.

Any other thoughts? OR... will you please direct me to a safe site to download a few free patterns specifically bent toward landscape use?

I appreciate your help and patience!

What happened to your hatch patterns is a mystery to me. My first guess is they were deleted somehow.

Hatch patterns can be found all over the Internet. I can't name any specific sites off the top of my head at the moment.

Why don't you have a copy of the hatch patterns on a flash drive or backed up to another folder on your hard drive?

If one runs a disk clean-up program, like the one that comes with Mcafee virus software, it will gather up files that have not been used for a while. It does present the user with a list of the files and the choice to delete them. If one does not know what they are looking at, one may delete them simply because they are old, and Mcafee says they don't need them.

Mareber

Did you manage to find your missing patterns ?

bit late now I know but I was interested to know if you've resolved the problem

Either he fixed the path that pointed to the location of the hatch pattern file(s) or he replaced the file(s) that were somehow deleted.

It's just I had the same thing happen, all my custom hatches that I had appended to the .pat file disappeared from the other predefined tab where all the other patterns are and were showing up in the custom tab as a list. turned out that autocad had somehow pointed itself to the original .pat files I had created and was superseding the appended ones ? Deleted the originals from my pc and all my custom hatches re-appeared in the other predefined tab.

My guess is your version of AutoCAD is one of those with AI and decided it liked to do things a different way.

I think there is a good message here dont add your custom patterns to acad.pat, 2nd part always back up the global stuff. 3rd you can undelete but you have to do it almost straight away once you realise something is gone. FYI a file that is deleted is not rubbed out only its space on the disk is now marked as free hence they can live for quite a while.

A nice file finder extemely fast to put in perspective @#$%^ on windows search, google "EVERYTHING" or http://www.voidtools.com/ Our server is at 1.4Tb no problems.