Firstly - how long should the initial creation of the VRDB take?
Secondly - is the avast! Antivirus service supposed to stop while this is happening?
My machine seems to be taking almost a day (and still going) to create the initial database. The service is also stopping while the VRDB generator does its thing.
I installed avast! to another machine, and its database was created within a minute.
My machine has a second hard drive with an ext2 partition, and a windows driver so that windows can see the ext2 partition.
Thats about the only thing odd about my PC compared to any other.
Should I just let the VRDB generator keep going, or should I just disable it completely?
I guess this brings another question… why is this happening?
Edit:
Further info…
If I attempt to restart the service while VRDB is generating, it dies again immediately.
If I stop the VRDB generation, the “I” logo keeps spinning until I restart the avast service.
The avast service stays running from there on.
The VRDB generation does not take any CPU, so I can only guess that its not actually doing anything the whole time.
As I said in my previous post, it looks like its not doing anything other than turning the icon.
I uninstalled avast, deleted avast from the Program Files directory, searched the registry for keys and deleted them, then reinstalled.
I tried to create the VRDB again and it started to work for a while (using around 30% cpu and alot of HDD activity), but after around an hour the service died again and I was back to where I was before.
Turning on debug logging doesnt seem to tell me anything.
Any suggestions? Any idea why this service is crashing?
Please check the file \Data\avast4.ini (after the service has crashed). In the [VRDB] section, there should be a key called LastFile. Is it there? If yes, what is the value?
I find it rather unlikely, but maybe VRDB has problems with some file… and the “LastFile” value is likely to be rather close to the “bad” one (probably the one before that).
Additionally, are there any recent unpXXXXXXXX.tmp files (where X are some numbers) or *.mdmp files in \Data\Log directory?
I have tar’d up the folder and deleted the original.
At the moment I’m updating my Linux system, but when I boot back to windows I will try again and see what happens.
It was very weird - in windows when I tried to zip up the folder, winzip was giving errors saying “cant add LastFile=D:\home\piggie\pipeband\html\admin\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\” filename too long, and other errors similar.
It appears that the ext2 driver for windows might have some problems,w hich in turn caused problems with Avast.
I will post back here with what I find anyway for future reference.
I can confirm that this was the problem.
The database was created relatively quickly after I got rid of this directory.
Obviously VRDB was getting into some kind of directory level loop because windows was not reading the EXT2 drive properly.
