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epsilon
Former Member
Message 1 of 43

Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Hi,

I'm using Total Protection (from McAfee via subscription) on my PC.  Have latest version (VirusScan 15.0.288, for example).  Running Windows XP SP3.  The machine is a fairly fast 8-core beast although it is coming up to 3 years old now.  My C drive is 2 SSDs in RAID 0, so fairly fast and I have a couple of TB of hard drives internally plus some externals.

I've a number of large DV format avi files on my (internal 500GB) D drive (some well over 20GB).  They've been there for several months and never seemed to cause a problem for virus scanning in the past.  A day or two ago, the latest version of McAfee downloaded onto my machine.  I started my weekly scheduled full scan at midnight last night.  Normally a full scan takes roughly 45 minutes but when I got up this morning the scan was still in progress.  The scan seemed to be stuck on one of the big avi files.  The disk access light was on continuously but when I ran task manager, CPU activity was down at just 1-2 percent.  I tried to end the scan in the McAfee window but no success.  Shutdown from Task Manager got part way there but then also hung up with the disk access light still on.  Eventually I had to use the power button to shut down.

Today I've tried various things to investigate.  I ran virtual technician but that came up with no problem.  I uninstalled and re-installed completely, from McAfee website (using the recommended clean-up procedure) but then a manual scan still came up with the same problem.  The scan gets through everything on the C drive in about 10 minutes and then moves on to my hard drives.  A moderate amount of smallish stuff on my D drive is scanned reasonably quickly over the next few minutes.  Then it gets to the big avis.  The first two or three avis are a little below 20GHz in size and seem to scan problem-free in a few minutes each.  It seems to be when it gets to the bigger ones (around 23GB+) that things seem to hang up.

I suspect that things may not be hanging completely as the files where it starts to hang up are not the same one where I found it stuck after the overnight run so it may just be running extremely slowly (in fact, in my attempts today I've found that it doesn't always hang up in exactly the same place - on a couple of occasions it hung on the first big avi but on one occasion it got through that one and stopped on the next - slightly bigger one).  If it is still progressing, however, it's certainly taking several hours per file, as opposed to the few minutes per file previously.  I always end up having to power-off as I cannot end the scan or shut down when it gets into the problem state.

I thought about drive faults or file corruption but looking at the D drive with HDDscan shows no problems and I can copy or play the problem avi files quite normally in Windows.  It just seems to be Virusscan which is hanging up.  Just for the record, the same problem occurs with a custom scan on just the D drive.  Nothing to suggest I've any malware on the machine and the McAfee scans (as far as they get) come up clean as well as other scanners I've tried (Windows Defender and Malwarebytes to be specific).

Anyone got any ideas?  Has the latest version of Virusscan got a problem with these big files?

(As an aside, I also noticed that, when doing my custom scan on just the D drive, it was occasionally scanning files from the C drive too.  Is this normal?)

Thanks for any suggestions.

e

42 Replies
epsilon
Former Member
Message 2 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Just an update on the above:

Tried a custom scan excluding the D drive.  But I forgot that I also have some avi files on my E drive and I noticed that the scan seemed to get stuck on one of these.  I left it running overnight and when I got up this morning, the scan was just completing.  So it looks as if I was correct in suggesting that the scan was still progressing through these avi files, just ridiculously slowly.

e.

epsilon
Former Member
Message 3 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

More info:

Tried scanning individually one of the avi files on which a full scan appears to hang up.  It scanned without problem in about 3 minutes.  So it seems the hang-up problem may be specific to full or custom scans.

e.

Peacekeeper
Message 4 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

The new version 2011 version can exclude files and folders from scheduled and custom scans. Ubnfortunately full scan is what it says full and might slow up on multi Gb files. Set up scheduled to exclude the AVI folder.

If you scan D drive I think it does some system files on C as a matter of course.

My worry is the file could be infected  can you point me to a file name and where to get it? I will try to download it and scan it as a test.

epsilon
Former Member
Message 5 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Thanks for that, Peacekeeper.

Unfortunately, there isn't anywhere I can point you to for a file.  I created them and they exist only on my PC.  I think trying to upload to anywhere (if I had anywhere to put them) them might stretch my broadband limit a bit.

As I said in my later posts, however, there are multiple files on which it seems to slow down, not always repeatably, and even on different drives - not just a single file.  Also, when I did scan one of the files individually, the scan completed in about 3 minutes (and came up clean - I don't think I mentioned that).  This suggests to me that infection is unlikely.

What I will do, when I get the chance (I'm interleaving this with house redecorating!), is to try a few more individual scans of various types and see if anything shows up.

As regards multi-GB files, the question which I have to ask is why was there no problem using the previous version of McAfee and problems now.  Seems like a big backward step.

I'll get back when I can.

e.

Peacekeeper
Message 6 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

OK try the exclude folders and files option that should help but make for you try an individual scan of the files to ensure no infection before you exclude them.

Redecorating been there but 4 years ago . Bank balance hurt a bit but the place looks better for it.

darkpath
Former Member
Message 7 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

  Wish I would have looked here first. I have the same issue. My pc kept going to sleep before scan was finished so, I was like ok I will tell it to never goto sleep. Did not matter used to have a 30 minute scan and now when it gets to d drive with avi's it says its at 99% but have let it run for hours. I can not cancle scan, I tried to restart, and it sticks on shuting down for hour. I too finally have to hit the power button. I tried scan disk on both drives, then ran malwarebytes also. I also did scf /scannow. All came back ok. I was also thinking the drive was messed up so I ran tests on it also. I finially was thinking maybe just let it try to finish. and have spent 12 hours at 99% and still slowly going through avi's.

  Oh, and yes this is windows 7 64bit and also did not happien until the update that forced restart the other night.

Peacekeeper
Message 8 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

As I said put all avis in question in same folder and exclude that folder from custom and scheduled scans. Post back if that helps. Will mention this in our moderator call tomorrow

Message was edited by: Peacekeeper on 20/06/11 5:21:38 PM
epsilon
Former Member
Message 9 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Ah, so at least I'm not the only one.  Thanks for posting, darkpath.

This would seem to suggest it's less likely that the files are infected or the hardware's bad and seems to throw suspicion back onto the McAfee update.

I've been getting heavily wrapped up in stripped wallpaper since my last post so haven't had much chance to do further investigation.  I did manage to do individual scans on a couple of 'problem' avi files which both came up clean and completed in around 3 minutes each.  It seems that individual file scans can run at normal speed.  The slow running seems to be associated with a full or custom type scan.  I also scanned some files with malwarebytes without any problem showing up.

I did try to run individual McAfee scans on some other files but, strangely, McAfee wouldn't scan them fully.  It didn't hang up but came back immediately saying that they were clean.  These were all files that had been scanned shortly before (either via the custom scan of my E drive which had completed overnight or via previous individual scans).  Even when I tried re-scanning the files that I had just scanned minutes before, they came back clean, without re-scanning.  It looks to me like McAfee includes something that avoids files being scanned twice in a limited period (perhaps the same day?) and just returns a 'clean' result immediately.  Does anyone know if this is the case or is it perhaps something new?

Anyway, as I said, it is starting to look like the recent McAfee update is the culprit here and something in the full/custom scan process is now dragging the scan speed of certain files down by a huge factor.  Next thing I'll try, when I have time, is to follow Peacekeeper's suggestion.

Thanks guys.

Peacekeeper
Message 10 of 43

Re: Full Scan Slows/Hangs on big avis

Will ask re your recent scan query and added a query re the large avis to our tech call

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