System hung? Or let it go?

S

steve2267

New Member
Q: Is my system hung / frozen and I should do a hard reset (via power button), or could NTLite still be crunching away?

Background: Started an NTLite integration process at 12:15. System clock (lower right corner) is unchanged at 12:52. Current time is 13:38. Slipstreaming latest Windows Updates + all Dell drivers from a Dell Win 7 Pro x64 .cab driver bundle. Windows has become unresponsive. Mouse is responsive, but clicking on windows does not change focus to that window. ALT-TAB does not switch between windows. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC does not bring up the task manager window (which was running.) CTRL-ALT-DELETE does not bring up any windows.

Moving cursor over NTLite window shows spinning circle. NTLite window is partially obscured. Unable to bring it to the front.

Dell m5510 Mobile Precision workstation
16GB RAM
created 10GB RAMdisk via ImDisk
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit fully patched
512GB NVMe Samsung 960 EVO SSD (Drives C:, D:)
1GB Samsung 850EVO SSD (Drives E-H)
 
At 14:15, after two hours, I killed the machine and hard rebooted.

I suspect perhaps I ran out of RAM due to the RAMdisk and the system was thrashing. But I don't know. I am going to re-run NTLite without the RAMdisk this time and see if it will complete.
 
After rebooting, I removed the (ImDisk) RAMdisk and re-started NTLite (version 1.5.0.6025 64-bit). This time I only integrated the Windows 7 updates -- no drivers. It completed successfully after 1:03.
 
Hi Steve,
I would be interested in replicating this, to see if it's the ramdisk's fault.
- Which ramdisk you use?
- Which temp and scratch locations did you set to it and how?
- Would just integrating updates trigger the issue, please attach the preset if it's not any update?

Thanks.
 
ImDisk Toolkit 20170706
Dell Mobile Precision m5510 with 16GB RAM
After fresh reboot, before starting applications, configured a 10GB RAMdisk using ImDisk. I think I had it configured to "dynamically allocate" RAM, but I am not 100% sure.
TEMP and scratch were set to R:\TEMP and R:\TEMP\NTLiteTEMP, respectively. R:\ was the RAMdisk. I set these in NTLite GUI via File>Settings.

I am not sure if just integrating updates triggers the issue or not. How do I attach the preset?
 
After rebooting, I removed the (ImDisk) RAMdisk and re-started NTLite (version 1.5.0.6025 64-bit). This time I only integrated the Windows 7 updates -- no drivers. It completed successfully.
 
After further re-reading, it just sounds like your RAM Drive is set too high and Windows ran out of free memory.
I thought your installed image was having issues, the tool can't have that kind of effect on the host windows.

Also disabling/lowering pagefile size would cause that sooner, if RAM is low.

Let me know if that makes sense.
 
nuhi, I understand that the system running out of RAM would definitely cause issues. I suspect this is what happened. I do not recall seeing the HDD indicator drive flickering, so I'm not sure it was swap or paging thrashing.

However, I was not able to duplicate the error. Re-running the Windows Updates + driver integration after a reboot and WITHOUT the RAMdrive did complete successfully. I also re-ran the same thing again with a RAMdrive, but this time I believe I only had NTLite Settings set to use the RAMdrive (R:) for scratch space; I set the TEMP space to D:TEMP, a directory on the SSD. I used ImDisk for my RAMdrive, and configured it to NOT use dynamic memory. I also had to configure it for 11GB -- when set at 10GB, NTLite complained that there was not enough space. With these settings (11GB RAMdrive, NOT dynamic, NTLite settings scratch space to R:\NTLTemp and temp to D:\Temp) NTLite completed integrating Windows Updates + Drivers without any issues or problems.
 
Thanks for the info.

Yes, temp dir gets bigger while integrating or changing image files in general, as it's where the files are stored for the big save at the end, to the WIM file.
Scratch dir on the other hand holds only the temporary files for the current action, so its size is never as that one of the Temp file, leaving your memory less used.

You did mention dynamic setting. I observed even if Dynamic memory is not used, at least I didn't specifically use it,, ImDisk is not using full disk capacity/memory until it's filled.
I was getting full disk messages when the disk could not expand due to non-activated Windows limit (16GB).
This is my RAM disk creation, talking about general use for browsers and saving ISO files, not necessarily as a scratch/temp dir
Code: 
imdisk -a -s 10G -m R: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y /V:RAM"
maybe that by default is dynamic, would explain what I experienced. Or by dynamic it means the reported volume size changes/expands, not about memory usage?
 
steve2267 said:
nuhi, I understand that the system running out of RAM would definitely cause issues.
Click to expand...

I run with 4gb ram(128mb for the graphics) and no pagefile, not had an issue yet. On the rare occasion i have had ntlite running but with no visible cpu activity. At 15minutes i wonder, at 30 izza bug.
 
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