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On-access scanner won't start

fizzicist

I run a backup that restarts my Mac once every 24 hours. Last night when the Mac restarted I noticed a screen prompt stating that Sophos AV for Mac wasn't running. I opened Sophos AV preferences, entered my authentication password, and clicked the Start Scanning button. The button grays out with the word "Starting..." on it, but on-access scanning never starts.

Eventually the padlock in the lower left corner of the Preferences window locks itself to prevent further changes, but the on-access scanning button remains grayed out, showing the word "Starting...". If I quit Sophos AV, re-launch the app, and then open preferences again, the on-access scanner is back to "off", and the Start Scanning button is active again. Clicking it just repeats the previous action, wherein the button goes gray and says "Starting..." endlessly.

I am running Sophos AV for Mac v9.2.2 on a Mac Pro Quad-Core 2.8 GHz (Mid-2010) with OS X 10.8.5.

:1020342


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  • 0

    Hey Fizzicist, 

    Sorry you're having trouble. Can you take a look in the logs to see what you find there? Maybe that will give us some idea why it seems to be stalling. Here's a quick video that will show you how to do that.

    :1020345
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    Hi serranonymous:

    Thanks for your reply. I've attached a file entitled Sophos AV Log,2015-03-10.txt, which contains the entries from the Sophos Anti-Virus.log file going back to March 8, when the on-access scanner was still working.

    I also took a screen shot of the error message that Sophos AV displayed after a restart following my installation of the recent OS X 10.8.5 security update:

    Sophos AV error.png

    On-access scanning is still not responding to manual start commands, and clearly it's not auto-starting when I reboot my computer.

    By the way, I checked the scan logs, but there's nothing unusual there. I haven't run a scan recently, so I didn't expect to find anything there.

    Thanks!

    :1020348
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    Hey...I just noticed that all of my custom scans are missing from the Scans window. The window also falsely reports that the full Scan This Mac scan has never been run. That's simply not true.

    It appears something has hammered Sophos Anti-Virus. Would a re-install be advisable?

    Thanks!

    :1020349
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    OK...it looks like re-installing the app provided a fix. I downloaded the installer and ran it. At first, the installer seemed to hang on "Removing...."; apparently it was removing previously installed components. Anyhow, it was hung, so I quit the installer and then relaunched it. This time it completed the installation successfully. When I checked Preferences, On-Access Scanning was running. Hopefully that will be the end of the problem. I did lose all my custom scans, but those are pretty easy to restore.
    :1020350
  • 0

    Excellent! Glad you were able to get it working.

    :1020354
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