Mydefrag does not start

[Johan]

I have been using JKDefrag succesfully on several computers. Recently i started using Mydefrag for testing purposes with good result on several computers. There is however 1 computer where Mydefrag does not start at all (not even start writing a log file). Are there some dependencies for Mydefrag that are different than those for JKDefrag, because the latter runs without any problems?

The system is an normal Pentium 4 M laptop with windows XP.

Thanks in advance.

[gerdb]

Are you running on battery power? MyDefrag will detect this and refuse to do anything.

[Johan]

No, it is not running on batteries, and i assume at least something is logged when starting the program, even if it refuses to defragment?

[jeroen]

I wonder what the problem could be. Can you please try running MyDefrag with the "-d 6" commandline switch?

[Johan]

Thanks Jeroen for the reply.

When I run mydefrag.exe -d 6 (from command line to be sure to see everything) nothing happens and the prompt immediately returns. Can not find any log file, event in the event viewer or dump somewhere. Looks really strange.

I looked at your exe with the Dependency walker from MS and this is the result, which looks ok to me (see attachement)

The only file that gets created around the time Mydefrag is started is a prefetch file (.pf) for Mydefrag.

Any other suggestion?

[jeroen]

With the "-d 6" commandline switch the program should always create a logfile called "c:\Program Files\MyDefrag v4.0b3\MyDefrag.log". The logfile is created when MyDefrag starts analyzing the commandline, after some basic Windows initialization stuff and before loading a MyDefrag script. I have no idea what could be wrong. Without any logfile or error message whatsoever there is not much for me to go on...

[Johan]

Jeroen,

Mydefrag is not installed in the default directory, will test if this makes a difference (it does not on other systems ...).
Will report everything i can find, I understand this is really difficult to debug, but there should be some reason ....

[Johan]

Jeroen,

Did a new test because of b6, but with the same results.
As I have VS2008 installed on this system (for VB and C# development), i created an empty project and set it to run mydefrag for debugging. (see pictures.)

I get the same error over and over again, somewhere in advapi.dll, and the dissasembly does not ring a bell for me, but maybe it does for you ...

Best regards,

Johan.

[jeroen]

Did a new test because of b6, but with the same results.

Thanks for testing and for the feedback, I appreciate it! The assembly dump looks to me as the beginning of a subroutine. It creates space on the stack for local variables, and stuff like that. The line with the yellow arrow is presumably where the program crashes. It's an initialization, it stores zero in one of the variables on the stack. I fail to see what could possibly be wrong with that....

As I have VS2008 installed on this system

The debug file with all the symbols "MyDefrag.pdb" is included in the distribution. Visual Studio should be able to tell exactly at which line in the sources it went wrong. You said earlier that you do not run from the default directory, perhaps you have only copied the "mydefrag.exe" executable?

[gemisigo]

I did a "copy-uninstall-try-to-run" sequence somewhere around beta4 and it worked without any problems for me. From that on I never installed it into the default directory. So that should not be a problem. Not tried the copy thing with beta6 though.

[Johan]

Jeroen,

Some latest updates around this issue. The error described above seems to occur in the exe loader, before any code you wrote executed. I have used tools like process monitor to view what happened, but the results where not conclusive. The crash occurs around the time imgutil.dll is loaded, but there seems no reason on this machine why this should fail. Because i hope to replace this machine in the next few months, i will not try to investigate this further unless there is a good reason to do so (Jkdefrag runs happily on this machine). MyDefrag runs (mostly) fine on the rest of the machines i have access to.

[jeroen]

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. I'm assuming that you are experiencing the same problem with the latest beta? And still no debuglogfile? Nobody else has reported this problem, so for the moment I am assuming it's something on this single computer, not a bug in MyDefrag.

[Ben]

Hi

Just like Johan, JKDefrag worked fine for me.

I decided to install MyDefrag, but it won't start. Nothing happens. No logs are created.

I use XP on a HP Pavilion.

Maybe a XP service that i disabled ?

Hope you can help.

Thank you, great job anyway.

[jeroen]

I decided to install MyDefrag, but it won't start. Nothing happens. No logs are created.

No "C:\Program Files\MyDefrag v4.0\MyDefrag.debuglog" file? The program should always create that debug logfile.

[Ben]

Thanks for the answer.

No, nothing, no .debuglog file.

Here is what you can find in the folder "C:\Program Files\MyDefrag v4.0\" :