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Fatal Disk Error

Former Member
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Powerbuilder Classic 12.5.2

We have user reporting Fatal Disk Errors from our Powerbuilder application more often than I'd like. Does any one have any ideas what causes these? I'd like to try and reduce them but I'm not sure where to start looking.

Thanks for any help

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

Former Member
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Hi Aaron;

  I've never seen any PB application get disk errors - ever unless  ... the hard drive / disk controller was actually failing.

   We have PB applications at work curreny that run 24/7 doing disk intensive operations on millions of images per day for weeks & months on end with never a disk error.

  It sounds like it's just one client (PC) - is that correct?

Regards ... Chris

Former Member
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Thanks Chris. We have a Citrix server farm, and it's happening to users on that, and I'm assuming it's on more than one machine, but I hope to find out more details today. We have seen this error in development when we do a release. If someone has left the application open and therefore a file locked, we kill off that open file lock and then copy the release over the top and then they will get a Fatal Disk Error the next time they run the application. Bit I don't think that should be happening on the Citrix server.

Former Member
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Hi Aron;

  We have lots of applications that run from a File server that also have the file locking issue on a DLL or the EXE. We have to kill off the file lock sessions in order to refresh the folder with a new application deployment. All our file server environments though are pure MS-Windows and not Citirix. Also, after refreshing the application files, there are no crashes from the application users on 1st time use.

I think your issue might well be Citrix. Even a network drive failure on our applications does not render a "Fatal Disk Errors" message of any kind. So I would definitely treat this issue as a Citrix related problem (for the time being) as being the likely cause.

Good luck .. I hope you get to the root of this problem soon!

Regards ... Chris

Former Member
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Interesting out testers are just using a network location of a Windows file server too, and we get a Fatal Disk Error pretty much every time we have to close some locked files. We do have an extensively used .NET COM dll, I wonder if it's that. It would be nice if Powerbuilder told me what it was trying to do when it got a Fatal Disk Error.

Former Member
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Hmm ... interesting - could it be that the "FDE" message is from another piece of software and not your PB application?

Former Member
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What I did for this situation is to have the Citrix shortcut point to a .bat file instead of the .exe file. I have two folders containing the executable files, one called Version1 and one called Version2. The .bat file executes one of the versions. To deploy a new version, I copy the files into the Version# folder currently not in use and then change the .bat file. The users currently running the app will pick up the new version the next time they start it. If the change is urgent, I then would send out an email requesting they exit and go back in.

Former Member
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Yes we've done this for other applications, and it works very well, but for some reason there has been resistance over the years to doing it for this application - I gave up the fight a while ago

Former Member
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I've always assumed Fatal Disk Error was a Powerbuilder thing, but I don't know why I thought that! I guess it is possible it's from something else, I doubt .NET as it is about 10,000 characters too short for a .NET error

arnd_schmidt
Active Contributor
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You can tell your testers to use Sysinternals Process Monitor and monitor your EXE.

Process Monitor

This helps to locate the error.

hth

Arnd

Former Member
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You can also build a non-visual PB app that reads the current version from an .ini file and launches the real app. This switcher app can have the same name as the real app and have the same icon.

Answers (6)

Answers (6)

Former Member
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Thanks for all the help. It looks to me like moving my application from a network drive to a local drive on the Citrix server is likely to solve this problem. Does anyone know if that also applies to the PBDK common files?

Thanks!

Former Member
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I would put a copy of the PB runtime files in the same folder as the app. That way you don't have to worry about updating the system path.

Former Member
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Hi,

We had this. Kept crashing every 10min. Running locally instead of from a share has helpt a lot.

See my thread

HTH,

Gerry.

Former Member
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Thanks Gerry!

Former Member
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I used to see that all the time. We were running the app off a network drive that was on a server that was having reliability issues. It happened whenever the app tried to load an object from a PBD and the PBD file couldn't be read because the users connection went down for a few seconds.

I moved the app executable to a different server and the problem went away.

The system admin in charge of the server should take a look at it.

Former Member
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Interesting I'll raise that to our server admins, thanks.

ricardojasso
Participant
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Aron,

I did away with running applications from the server a long time ago and instead developed an auto install routine that runs every time there is a new release available. Aside from getting rid of the kind of errors that you mention the applications ran a lot much faster locally than from the server. This was a long time ago and maybe with today's hardware it won't make much of a difference now but I kept the local run strategy anyway. Just not sure how this can be done using Citrix.

Ricardo

Former Member
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Thanks Ricardo - I wonder what we'll be able to do with Citrix in that regard, I will check with the server guys

Former Member
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Hi,

This has happened to us when someone was deploying the app in the same folder the user was trying to use it.

Bad idea... When we found out, we've Split our environment in two diferente places, things got back to normal.

former_member190719
Active Contributor
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I've seen that happening when an over aggressive virus scanner was blocking access to the file.

Are your PowerBuilder applications accessed through Citrix?  I've also seen that error when Citrix servers are running out of session memory.

Google Groups

Former Member
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Thanks Bruce, I'll see if I can get the guys to monitor the session memory, and perhaps consider excluding the files from the virus scanner for a bit to see if that helps.

Former Member
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Could be the app is trying to set directory to somewhere with lack of permissions or WiFi vs cable switch making network drives unavailable temporarily but fatally. Ask user what they were doing perhaps.

Former Member
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I don't think so. The users never seem to know what they were doing at the time, but it doesn't seem to be related to a particular operations as far as I can tell. See answer to below for more info.