Hello,

I recently added new ROIs to an already existing project, and have been trying to process all subjects through first-level for those new ROIs so that I may extract RRC matrices. When I get to first-level, four subject (318, 320, 322 and 326 out of 1084, perhaps it is informative that they are so close together) had errors and I was unable to get through first-level. I stopped the job, and tried to go back and denoise those 4 subjects again. That worked fine, but now when I try to merge the denoised jobs, it crashes when I get to subject 318. Here is the error:

Error using load
Unable to read MAT-file /project2/skeedy/BSNIP2_2020/BSNIP2_2020_conn.0318210430161424709.dmat. File might be corrupt.
Error in conn_merge (line 46)
temp=load(deblank(filenames{n1a}),'CONN_x','-mat');
Error in conn_merge (line 30)
value = conn_merge(char(filenames(nbatch:min(numel(filenames),nbatch+MAXMEM-1))));
Error in conn_projectmanager (line 125)
conn_merge(allfiles);
Error in conn (line 850)
conn_projectmanager('updateproject',fromgui);
Error in conn_jobmanager (line 357)
conn('load',filename);
Error in conn (line 1093)
conn_jobmanager;
Error in conn_menumanager (line 120)
feval(CONN_MM.MENU{n0}.callback{n1}{1},CONN_MM.MENU{n0}.callback{n1}{2:end});

Now I am unable to get through merging even of denoising, so I always have a pending job dialogue and I cannot move forward. We were hoping to exclude those four subjects from the analysis, but I need to finish first-level and merge that with the project in order to extract RRC matrices, which I am unable to do if I can't merge. 

Do you have any ideas as to why these 4 subjects may have caused errors in first-level, and why they are now causing crashes when I attempt to merge denoising results? In previous analyses with this dataset we had no problems with these subjects.

Thank you,
Mikey

You can try deleting (or maybe just in case, relocating) those dmat files somewhere else so CONN won't even try to load them. Then after merging try rerunning first level and skipping already processed/subjects ROIs.