Nightmare

If you're new to FAH and need help getting started or you have very basic questions, start here.

Moderators: Site Moderators, FAHC Science Team

Tony_Bradford
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:12 am

Nightmare

Post by Tony_Bradford »

My experience with Folding@Home has been a nightmare.

A week or so ago I installed it on my games machine - CPU + 2GPUs. Picked up a couple of WUs - one on a GPU, a couple on the CPU. Clocked up 64k points for my team. After a couple of days, tho', the viewer told me that one of the cards had 'failed', then this morning it told me both had.
Shut down and restarted the machine to see if something might reset and the viewer told me FAH's status was 'updating', in yellow. After a few hours of that it became apparent that the program had frozen up as nothing would respond. I suppose I could uninstall and reinstall the program but is it worth the trouble if it's going to keep falling over?

I did try installing FAH on another older Windows 7 machine. As soon as the installer started running it quit with a message that another FAH process is running and telling me to stop it. Given this is the first time I've installed FAH on this machine I've no idea what its talking about.

Much as I'd like to help FAH it really makes for too much work. Even joining this forum needed three attempts.




i
ajm
Posts: 750
Joined: Sat Mar 21, 2020 5:22 am
Location: Lucerne, Switzerland

Re: Nightmare

Post by ajm »

Sorry to learn that you're having such difficulties. FAH is indeed not the easiest software to run, but it actually does, on 100.000s of computers: https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
If you want to make it work, you certainly will. And if you post more infos about your setup, someone here might be able to pinpoint the source of the issue.
This is a good place to start: viewtopic.php?p=327407&f=24#p327407
PantherX
Site Moderator
Posts: 6986
Joined: Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:33 am
Hardware configuration: V7.6.21 -> Multi-purpose 24/7
Windows 10 64-bit
CPU:2/3/4/6 -> Intel i7-6700K
GPU:1 -> Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
§
Retired:
2x Nvidia GTX 1070
Nvidia GTX 675M
Nvidia GTX 660 Ti
Nvidia GTX 650 SC
Nvidia GTX 260 896 MB SOC
Nvidia 9600GT 1 GB OC
Nvidia 9500M GS
Nvidia 8800GTS 320 MB

Intel Core i7-860
Intel Core i7-3840QM
Intel i3-3240
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
Intel Core 2 Duo T8300
Intel Pentium E5500
Intel Pentium E5400
Location: Land Of The Long White Cloud
Contact:

Re: Nightmare

Post by PantherX »

Welcome to the F@H Forum Tony_Bradford,

Sorry to hear about your experience. However, if you're willing to give it a second shot and work with us, we would be happy to help out :)

Please note that since you mentioned gaming machine, if you have overclocked CPU/GPU, there's a possibility that while it would be stable for gaming, it can be unstable for folding since folding is much more stressful than gaming.
ETA:
Now ↞ Very Soon ↔ Soon ↔ Soon-ish ↔ Not Soon ↠ End Of Time

Welcome To The F@H Support Forum Ӂ Troubleshooting Bad WUs Ӂ Troubleshooting Server Connectivity Issues
paulmd199
Posts: 35
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2020 4:41 am
Hardware configuration: Machine 1: Gigabyte Z160MX-Gaming 5, Core i5-6500, eVGA 600 W PSU, thermaltake water 3.0120 cooling, 16GB DDR4, GPU 0: GT1030, GPU 1: GTX1050 Ti, GPU 2: GTX1660

Machine 2: Core i3 laptop (dell inspiron 1464)

Retired/spare: GT 750
Unusable: Intel HD 530

Re: Nightmare

Post by paulmd199 »

First thing I'd do is determine whether or not your cards have indeed failed, or are likely to overheat. This will verify whether or not FAH is the problem, or your hardware is.

Basic things like monitoring the temperature and fan usage.
There are many benchmarking, stresstesting, and monitoring applications you can use. Furmark is one, Unigine is another, both work fine. The principle is to put your video cards under load and see if they start frying. 80 centigrade is hot but stable, 90 or above is bad.

Next is to make sure you've got the latest drivers installed from your manufacturer. Clean install, by preference. Reboot even though you don't technically have to. You may wish to stresstest again, afterward, just to be sure.

Provided things check out on the hardware end. then we can work on FAH.
Tony_Bradford
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:12 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by Tony_Bradford »

Well I'll leave the main machine until tomorrow. This is the message I get when I try to install Folding@Home 7.6.9 on my VIAO, Windows 7.

"Failed to install files. Most likely some software, possibly Folding@Home is currently using one or more files that the installer is trying to upgrade. Please stop all running Folding@home software and quit any applications that are using files from the Folding@home installation. Note, complete shutdown can take a little while while the application has closed."

Kind'a head-banging stuff, seeing as I'm trying to install F@H for the first time so it can hardly be already running.

(Would have been nice to have been able to copy and paste the message rather than typing it all out, or even attach a screen print of it with this post but, hey, why make it easy.)
HaloJones
Posts: 906
Joined: Thu Jul 24, 2008 10:16 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by HaloJones »

What happens with a clean boot? It may be that the downloaded installer tried to run and now you're running it manually?
single 1070

Image
Tohya
Posts: 48
Joined: Thu Feb 07, 2008 12:41 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by Tohya »

Some third party program is using a .dll that is the same as the one FAH wants to install. If you have GoG exit it and try to install the 7.6.11 beta client https://foldingathome.org/beta/
PantherX
Site Moderator
Posts: 6986
Joined: Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:33 am
Hardware configuration: V7.6.21 -> Multi-purpose 24/7
Windows 10 64-bit
CPU:2/3/4/6 -> Intel i7-6700K
GPU:1 -> Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
§
Retired:
2x Nvidia GTX 1070
Nvidia GTX 675M
Nvidia GTX 660 Ti
Nvidia GTX 650 SC
Nvidia GTX 260 896 MB SOC
Nvidia 9600GT 1 GB OC
Nvidia 9500M GS
Nvidia 8800GTS 320 MB

Intel Core i7-860
Intel Core i7-3840QM
Intel i3-3240
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
Intel Core 2 Duo T8300
Intel Pentium E5500
Intel Pentium E5400
Location: Land Of The Long White Cloud
Contact:

Re: Nightmare

Post by PantherX »

Tony_Bradford wrote:...(Would have been nice to have been able to copy and paste the message rather than typing it all out, or even attach a screen print of it with this post but, hey, why make it easy.)
Take a screenshot when you want.
Upload to Imgur: https://imgur.com/upload or any other hosting provider
Paste the URL here.

I believe that due to some technical limitations, there's no native image hosting provided by the Forum itself. While it's a good to have feature, there are workarounds available.
ETA:
Now ↞ Very Soon ↔ Soon ↔ Soon-ish ↔ Not Soon ↠ End Of Time

Welcome To The F@H Support Forum Ӂ Troubleshooting Bad WUs Ӂ Troubleshooting Server Connectivity Issues
Tony_Bradford
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:12 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by Tony_Bradford »

OK. Thanks for that PantherX. I've used it below.

The machine is my wife's old laptop I use occasionally to run old Windows games. Its a Sony Viao - Intel i5-2430M 2.4GHz 64-bit 4GB RAM running Windows 7. The only thing running from boot is its AVG, apart from all Microsoft's spyware and anything else that's crept beneath the radar.

I downloaded fah-installer_7.6.9_x86.exe to the G drive but when I try to run it, accept the license and choose quick install I get the log file per:

Image

The last file skipped in the log is ssleay32.dll.

It's the same result on a cold boot. Before or after hitting the .exe installer there are no FAH folders on the C:/ drive.

I have thought about running fah from a live Linux USB stick on this machine, but it all feels like too much hard work.

Will report on the other machine's failure later.

Mod Edit: Fixed Image Tags - PantherX
PantherX
Site Moderator
Posts: 6986
Joined: Wed Dec 23, 2009 9:33 am
Hardware configuration: V7.6.21 -> Multi-purpose 24/7
Windows 10 64-bit
CPU:2/3/4/6 -> Intel i7-6700K
GPU:1 -> Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti
§
Retired:
2x Nvidia GTX 1070
Nvidia GTX 675M
Nvidia GTX 660 Ti
Nvidia GTX 650 SC
Nvidia GTX 260 896 MB SOC
Nvidia 9600GT 1 GB OC
Nvidia 9500M GS
Nvidia 8800GTS 320 MB

Intel Core i7-860
Intel Core i7-3840QM
Intel i3-3240
Intel Core 2 Duo E8200
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
Intel Core 2 Duo T8300
Intel Pentium E5500
Intel Pentium E5400
Location: Land Of The Long White Cloud
Contact:

Re: Nightmare

Post by PantherX »

Weird... after you reboot your system, make sure you do not run the fah-installer_7.6.9_x86.exe. Instead, can you navigate to these two locations to see if there's any data or not:
C:\Program Files (x86)\FAHClient
%AppData%\FAHClient

If F@H Has never been installed, there shouldn't be anything in those locations. Can you also check the Task Manager to see if there's any processes that start with FAH...

I note that you have GOG downloaded. I know that GOG causes issues with F@H installation so you can exit it and see if it works or not: viewtopic.php?f=108&t=34665
ETA:
Now ↞ Very Soon ↔ Soon ↔ Soon-ish ↔ Not Soon ↠ End Of Time

Welcome To The F@H Support Forum Ӂ Troubleshooting Bad WUs Ӂ Troubleshooting Server Connectivity Issues
Tony_Bradford
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2020 5:12 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by Tony_Bradford »

Sorry, I've pretty much had it.

I don't know what the problem is in Windows. I've no F@H folders or files in C:/Program Files (X86) before or after an attempted installation. I don't really know what GOG is but it's not running, as far as I can tell.

I did try setting up a dual-boot with Linux Mint so's I could run F@H in Mint, and nearly ended up with an unbootable machine. Now I've wasted 10GB of my SSD on a partition I can't boot into so I might as well give it back to Windows.

I just can't face trying to find out why F@H has folded on my PC.
bruce
Posts: 20824
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: Nightmare

Post by bruce »

The first time this problem came up, I opened a ticket with GoG asking why they were installing .clls in directories named for our client. I've received a couple of prerecorded email messages saying that because of the Virus, they cannot respond immediately. I'm wondering if they're a malware company, but that's really not clear yet. Manually remove those dll files and the FAH installer can proceed.

If anybody INTENTIONALLY installed GoG, please tell me what you use if for.
Rel25917
Posts: 303
Joined: Wed Aug 15, 2012 2:31 am

Re: Nightmare

Post by Rel25917 »

Gog is a game seller like steam. Bought games from them in the past but never used their software.
ajm
Posts: 750
Joined: Sat Mar 21, 2020 5:22 am
Location: Lucerne, Switzerland

Re: Nightmare

Post by ajm »

bruce wrote:Manually remove those dll files and the FAH installer can proceed.
Yes, I would try and remove this ssleay32.dll. In Windows 7, you might be able to do that using Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features. There also can be an uninstall.exe or unins000.exe together with the dll.
bruce
Posts: 20824
Joined: Thu Nov 29, 2007 10:13 pm
Location: So. Cal.

Re: Nightmare

Post by bruce »

Aha. I guess that makes some sense. They decided FAH must be a game and they wanted to increase their sales based on some kind of monitoring of your playing the "game" of FAH.
Post Reply