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I am trying to create a raster from a polygon (ie polygon to raster conversion tool) in ArcGIS 10.3 but I receive a 999999 ERROR message. The raster is at 1km from a 1km fishnet/mesh polygon for the entire continent of Africa. When I try to create this same raster from a subset of the polygon (ie I clipped out a small section of the 1 km fishnet/mesh polygon and used the same methodology to create the raster), it worked well with no issues. However, when I try to create it for the larger area of all of Africa, it fails.

I have tried to trouble shoot - it is in a personal geodatabase (not a shapefile) so I would hope that file size would not be an issue, I have unchecked the "background processing" option in Geoprocessing > Geoprocessing options, and I have even tried restarting ArcGIS just in case it had some "hang up" from creating the fishnet (I have tried in catalog too).

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this might be happening?

Maybe it is just that I don't have a large enough processor to handle the 1km raster for the entire continent of Africa?

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  • Does the error also occur with background geoprocessing checked?
    – Kirk Kuykendall
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 14:31
  • Unfortunately yes, it occurs with it checked and without it checked. I also just tried the same methodology with a 2km fishnet for the entire continent of Africa and it worked. Unfortunately 1km is just not working. Thanks for your suggestion though!
    – Carly
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 16:24
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    Did you try with a file gdb instead of a personal gdb?
    – Kirk Kuykendall
    Commented Aug 5, 2016 at 16:34
  • Unfortunately it occurs with a personal gdb or a file gdb. Thanks though! Any other ideas?
    – Carly
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 19:09
  • How did you generate the Fishnet polygons? Perhaps you could generate an ASCII raster instead.
    – Kirk Kuykendall
    Commented Aug 10, 2016 at 19:20

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There are some Q&As about this problem, but none fits what you are describing. Most common trigger for the 999999 error in polygon to raster is the background processing issue. Others relate to the use of float as cell size, and some to illegal characters in the path. From what you are describing, I believe that none of these are your problem.

By what you are telling it looks like a memory problem. I suggest you try to watch your task manager (assuming windows is your OS). It can help debugging, you might go out of RAM which will crash the process (also see @D.E. Wright answer discussing memory issue on scratch GDB).

Anyhow a work around that might work would be to split your fishnet in 2, 3 etc. different shape files, rasterize each of them and merge them together with the mosaic tool. I used this process when a similar attempt with qgis has crashed.

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