System hangs at startup

Technical Articles ID: KB87281
Last Modified: 8/20/2018

Environment

McAfee VirusScan Enterprise (VSE) 8.8 Update 7

Problem

An affected system does not complete the startup sequence. You might see the Please wait screen, but the system does not start.

Do not confuse this issue with slow startup symptoms.

An affected system might also hang when starting third-party applications or accessing files.

Cause

An interaction between FileInfo.sys, the Prefetch driver, and McAfee code leads to a deadlock between threads that are waiting on one another.

Solution

This issue is resolved in VSE 8.8 Update 8.

Updates are available when you log on to the ServicePortal at: https://support.mcafee.com/downloads.

Workaround

Disabling the Prefetch startup operations avoids the deadlock.

For information about disabling Prefetch, see:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms940847(v=winembedded.5).aspx

NOTE: It is not advisable to disable Prefetch for all systems because some hardware might be adversely affected (slow performance, especially at startup).

Related Information

This issue might occur with multiple McAfee products because the underlying code, SysCore, is shared among many products.

To investigate this issue, generate a full system dump after the symptom has occurred. If possible, generate the dump after the symptom has been present for several minutes to ensure the hung state is reflected in the memory dump.

Or, you can identify the issue by elimination. After disabling Prefetch, as explained in the Workaround, the system will boot normally.

Affected Products

Known Issue/Product Defect
VirusScan Enterprise 8.8

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