Folding Forum

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.




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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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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/

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.

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:



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

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

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.

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.

Gog is a game seller like steam. Bought games from them in the past but never used their software.

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.

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.