.Net Framework 3.5 Killed My Box– Update

[Sorry… no Lisp/SICP type content here.  Just another public service message.]

We have a slew of old HP machines running at 2.6 GHz, 504 MB RAM, and with mediocre hard drives with at least 25 GB of hard drive space on them. I expected this to be ample performance to run bleeding edge .Net applications, but it may have been pushing it a little. In any case, the machines have been running continuously for five years or so– they never get shut down. I was not aware of this when I did the installs, and later found out that a couple of machines had “trouble” when they were rebooted.

One machine simply died when I shut down before beginning the .Net install. I was rebooting everything when I was doing the load because I wanted to pin down the exact install that (potentially) could kill the machine. Little did I know at the time, that I was probably better off attempting the complete deck of installations without any rebooting.

Two other machines would attempt to boot up, but take you to the safe mode menu. Attempting to boot from there resulted in the system hanging after it loaded a file called mup.sys. One of them was that first machine that died after installing .Net on it. Another just seemed to come by this naturally.

After looking at all of the facts, it does not appear that .Net is directly to blame for any of the problems. Two of the boxes were seriously abused before I even showed up. The one that I thought I had killed probably had a dodgy hard-drive. Information about the exact cause of the mup.sys hang is sketchy at best– it can apparently be caused by any number of things.

Most users seem to be running fine. Some have complained that installing the new software has slowed their boxes down, however. There’s been no major disasters so far. Users are hitting the application pretty hard now and things seem to be holding up. I did not have to change to a web app at the last moment. We’ll keep an eye on things, but I’m not worried.

.Net Framework 3.5 Killed My Box

This is a non-Lisp related Public Service Message:

The boxes some of my users are running are pretty mediocre– running XP with really old hard drives that just chug along….

Installing .Net Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 and .Net Framework 3.5 and then trying to reboot, I find that the box is completely hosed. Plugging in the hardrive to another box… the computer no longer even recognizes it as NTFS!

After putting the backup image back onto it and adding some other software, rebooting several times, everything seems fine. But putting 2.0 SP1 and 3.5 on it again hoses it all over again. I don’t know if this is an isolated case or not– I don’t know what will happen if I try to deploy to other old boxes. I’d already deployed to several other machines just fine… but maybe not to any this old.

Maybe I missed some fine print somewhere, but this is not what I expect when doing what I’d otherwise expect to be a trivial installation.

I will follow this post up with additional details if I find anything out. I may be converting my desktop application to a web app if this happens again….