I can project from UTM (zone 10) into State Plane (Oregon), but I can't do the reverse — why not?

Question

I have an air photo with the following xy coordinate system name: NAD_1983_StatePlane_Oregon_North_FIPS_3601_Feet_Intl

and the following in the description field: Projection:

Lambert_Conformal_Conic false_easting: 26909776.041774  
false_northing: 0.000000  
central_meridian: -120.500000  
standard_parallel_1: 44.333333 
standard_parallel_2: 46.000000 
latitude_of_origin: 43.666667 
Linear Unit: Foot (0.304800)

Geographic Coordinate System:

GCS_North_American_1983
Angular Unit: Degree (0.017453292519943299)
Prime Meridian: Greenwich (0.000000000000000000)
Datum: D_North_American_1983
  Spheroid: GRS_1980
    Semimajor Axis: 6378137.000000000000000000
    Semiminor Axis: 6356752.314140356100000000

I cannot project either the air photo or a shapefile with the same spatial reference into UTM Zone 10 (regardless of whether it's NAD27 or NAD83). Why not? How can I overcome this problem? I get a generic projection error (error 999999; failed to execute).

Help!

Answer 1

Along the lines of what iant was getting at, make sure you are using the Project Raster tool (Data Management Tools -> Projections and Transformations -> Raster -> Project Raster) and the Project tool (Projections and Transformations -> Feature -> Project) and not the 'define projection' tool, but I doubt this is the problem...

A couple thoughts:

1.) Is background processing turned on? Check Geoprocessing -> Geoprocessing Options -> Uncheck background processing if it is checked. For some reason this feature can cause problems with certain processes on some machines.

2.) You mentioned that you can reproject data from UTM to State Plane, can you reproject one of these datasets that used to be UTM back?