How to Recover from a Plotter Crash

It will happen at some point. You will leave your plotters plotting, but when you come back, the Chia Client isn’t running or all your PowerShell windows are gone. You feel a bit of anguish when this happens, I know I sure did. There are some clean up steps that you need to perform in order to get plotting again.

1. Clean up Temp Files – If you’re curious like me, you may have opened the temp folder while a plotter was plotting. The plotter creates many files. When the plotter crashes, those files stay in the temp directory. These files are not small so they take a good amount of space. You need to delete these files and empty the recycle bin before you start plotting again.
2. Investigate – Take the time now to investigate why the crash happened since everything is offline.
   1. Check the Chia Logs. If you don’t know how, check this post.
   2. Check Windows Updates.
   3. Check the Windows Event Logs. In order to check these right-click the Windows icon at the bottom left of the screen and select “Event Viewer”. This may take some time to open, wait a minute or two. At the top left of the window, click “Windows Logs”. Then click “Applications”. Go through this log and look for a red “!”. These are the errors. Here is an example below:

Click the row that the error is on and it will give you some details that can help you figure out what happened. This information is also good to give in a bug report to the Chia Team in their KeyBase Chat (link located in Resources).

If nothing is found here then it could be an instability issue that caused a blue screen. Run through this post to minimize possible instability problems. Chia Plotting touches almost every aspect of the PC and as a result, any little instability can cause pain.