Quartus Prime 18.1.0 Build 625 09/12/2018 SJ Lite Edition (Cyclone V) - Why would the Fitter stop working on a known-good design?

[AIles]

After a 5-week hiatus, the fitter hangs without reporting an error, on a known-working project. There is no communication past the introductory "170189 Fitter placement preparation operations beginning" and "14951 The Fitter is using Advanced Physical Optimization" messages. There is no fitter log file. What used to be a 15-minute compile will now run for hours in this state if allowed.

This is also occurring in a pristine backup-restore of a known-working previous state of the project.

Is there something online that the tool uses and may have changed since mid-May? Do these licenses expire without notice or any indication from the tool?

Thanks for any info or ideas ...

[AIles]

Okay...I got past it. Tried many things.

At one point, 30 minutes into a 10-minute Fitter operation, I plugged a USB thumb drive into the computer and PRESTO, the Fitter started spewing status messages and a successful compile shortly completed.

My theory is that there was an unsuccessful thumb drive dismount operation pending in Windows and for some reason Quartus got stuck on that and was able to proceed when Windows cleared that condition in order to mount the freshly plugged thumb drive. Notably, there is no component of the current Quartus project that has anything to do with a thumb drive...

[sstrell]

Another thing to try when you run into this situation is to quit Quartus and delete the db and incremental_db folders in the project directory. That way if something is corrupted, it will get recompiled from scratch.

#iwork4intel

[AIles]

Yes, that's the best first thing to do, and was indeed the first action taken here.