Seth, I am just now trying the drag method into a new project.. still hanging, but i now see the "opening project..." appear at the top, but still too long. could it be that when I defragged the drive recently, it moved a track or two out of the project folder and is making sonar struggle to find it ??

 daveny5, I didn't think the drive would be at fault since this is an isolated case - ie, other projects work fine. but, I did recently defrag the drive, so maybe that is to blame ?

The versions, if the feature is enabled, are located in the directory with the cwp file. FYI, just because other data on the drive appears ok does not mean the disk is trouble free. Defrag would not relocate files with respect to the directory tree even if it physically relocated them on the drive. You may want to check your Windows event logs.

You could check the Windows Event Viewer for critical errors - a Windows-detected disk sub-system error would normally show up there, and it is a quick thing to check - but you might still want to run a full disk scan, just in case.

I wish I had some more ideas for you on this - sounds pretty grim for that project. I suppose if you needed to, you could try to locate as much of the project innards as possible, but I am not sure where things like automation and such are stored internally.  Certainly I would think that your recorded audio data would be recoverable, but that's not much consolation - perhaps others here in the forum know where the various project parts are stored, so you could evaluate if it is even possible to manually rebuild it - even partially.

I truly feel for you on this one.

Bob Bone

 thanks bob. I'm currently trying to find where sonar stores versions as I know i had activated versioning..

A cakewalk project consists of a the project file and related audio files, hopefully stored in a directory under the project directory. Everything that is not audio is stored in the project file. If versioning is enabled, there could be multiple versions of the project file stored in the project directory. The files are easy to identify as the file names are the full project name appended with a timestamp. Without a good backup or version, there is no way easily reconstruct the non-audio portions of a project.

Hi Josh, 
last year I had the same prob,
it was possible to open zhis projects with sonar 8.5.
Then I had the possibility to remove suspect software aso.

Good luck
Pragi 

 thank you pragi, i will try this too!

 Ok, so i reinstalled my previous version of sonar 6 . I deleted the suspected plugins and there was one groove clip drum track that I bounced. This worked. problem solved. So, yes, it was a plugin that caused the problem. I deleted a few suspects so i cannot be sure which was the culprit but i have my suspicions that is was the ampeg SVX plug that did, as that was amongst the last I employed. Thanks again for all your help !!

Good to read that your work is saved .
I like to  remind you to at least backup once in a while good working projects so that there is no big gap between the last backup and the actuell project.This way makes it easy to try out,which Vst aso is the "nut."
Pragi