gzum
27th February 2002 16:49 UTC
Possible Bug!
Hi folks, first off, I love this stuff! Great Product, great price, great attitude! Thanks.
I've been using nsis for a while (v1.44). I recently upgraded to 1.94 and had some pretty bad results. ~ 4 of 30 installs resulted in the PCs crashing - HARD. One was definately Win98 Second Edition. We stopped deploying and rebuilt the install with 1.44. It went right in on one of the machines that broke with the 1.94 version. These machines could have had other problems and the installer just triggered them. We tested on multiple platforms before starting deployment and had no problems.
The installer crashes before the first screen comes up (A liscense screen in our case). Most of the icons are deleted from the desktop, in one case the toolbar was still there but had no program files, or icons in control panel. When the system was rebooted, the system files were gone, when booted from a floppy, much of the C drive was gone, no windows directory, no files in the root directory. This behavior happened twice in a row with the 94 installer, when we went back to 44 it worked fine (after windows was reinstalled.)
I'm relieved that the old one worked and that is what we're using. Any ideas? Has anyone else reported such a thing? I want to get up to a newer version but I'm scared.
thanks,
gzum
bballer182
28th February 2002 01:08 UTC
Holy cow what were you installing?
That sounds terible. That has never happened to me before. I remenber a while back in one of the version change that some things were changed that would break the scripts, and make them not work right. I think one of them was the splash screen, and install options in a later version. You do know that 1.96 is the latest version, right?
Try searching the forum for related topics.
spanky
28th February 2002 06:34 UTC
sounds a bit like a virus to me.. if you are sure it's not a virus then could you post your installation script for us to see?
If you have any ideas as to what might be causing this the full source code is included with every release of NSIS.
gzum
28th February 2002 14:12 UTC
More infoe
Hi Gyus, I don't have a lot of information as I was the one who wrote the script and was not the one talking the customers through the install.
A couple of the systems that crashed suspected they had hardware problems or a virus. The one system I have more info on seems to not be a bug because they reinstalled windows and then ran the setup again and got the same result. They are sending us the PC that has the problem and we are giving them a new one I think. When I get the pc and If I can repeat the problem I'll post some more.
Here is the source for the script, but I don't think it ever really started to execute (as I said before, the first screen never came up.) There is nothing fancy here. Hope it helps.
Greg
plaztic
1st March 2002 10:33 UTC
Seems a bit odd. :weird: Checked your script and didn't see anything suspect about it. My advice would be a full virus scan on every computer with the latest and greatest anti virus strings. I dont think there's a need to reboot to dos and do the scan since the most, if not all anti virus products supports detection and virus removal from memory when in windows. Second, do a scandisk and be sure to check the surface. I know this will take a long time, but if there's a bad block you'll notice. Depending how bad the disk is, replacement might be an issue. :eek:
I wish you best luck!
\plaz
rainwater
1st March 2002 15:23 UTC
The virus may have been on your computer, not the computers doing the install. Thats why they might no be showing up after you do clean installs of the OS.