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Rob Brooks-Bilson's Blog
I've been having problems getting ColdFusion 8 installed on my laptop for months now. No matter how I tried installing it (stand alone, multi-server, j2ee), it caused my computer to Blue Screen during the install process. Everything would go ok right up until I launched the ColdFusion Administrator to complete the install process. After launching the CF Administrator, the computer would continue on for between 1 and 30 seconds before it would blue screen with a BAD_POOL_HEADER error.
I know others are having the problem as well as a Google search turns up several others with the problem but no satisfactory solution.
After a lot of off and on troubleshooting, I finally had a chance to sit down over the past two days and have figured out what the problem is and have come up with a workaround. It turns out that the issue is the JVM. More specifically, Java 6 (and on my machine Java 5 as well) causes the problem. I can cause the BSOD with Java 6 using both ColdFusion 8 and JBoss (without ColdFusion).
Since the ColdFusion 8 installer lays down the 1.6.0_01 jvm, you need a way to install ColdFusion 8 with an earlier jvm. Here's the workaround I've come up with. In my case, I chose to use the 1.4.2_14 version of the jdk:
- Go through the entire CF install (doesn't matter which server method). However, don't launch the CF Administrator to complete the install. If you do this, you'll BSOD.
- Download an older version of the Sun JDK. I happened to test with 1.4.2_14, which seems to be working for me. When I get time, I may test with earlier versions of 1.5, but the latest 1.5 still caused BSOD for me.
- Install the JDK. you may have to reboot.
- Open the jvm.config file (c:\jrun4\bin) and change java.home to point to the JDK you just installed. This will tell cf to use that jvm instead of the 1.6.0_01 version that installs with cf 8.
- Start all CF services. If any are already started, restart them.
- Open the CF Admin to complete the install process. It should complete without error, and without any BSOD.
At this point, you should be good to go. I should point out that the BSOD problem is most likely a problem with Java 6 and either my video card, or my NIC. I have an IBM T60 with an Intel Nic. Others in my office have the same laptop and nic, but aren't having the BSOD problem. They do, however have a different video card than I do (I have an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400). IBM OEM's the card in my case, so any resolution is going to have to come from them on my end. I have no idea if they will ever resolve the issue, so all I can do is continue to test new JVM versions with my setup as they come out to see if the problem has been resolved.
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Why don't you install it on a virtual machine like VMWare?
That's much better and then you also can use the OS you'll have on your production system.
I think there are a lot of reasons why developers install ColdFusion on their local machines and not on a virtual machine. In my specific case, I work for a fairly large corporation that regulates (to a point) what can and can't be installed on their machines. In my case, virtualization on the desktop is currently not supported.
You say that with virtualization, you can also run the OS used in production. This may or may not be true from both a system resources and/or cost perspective (say I'm running AIX in production and WinXP on my laptop). Many companies are not going to be willing to license both Win XP/Vista and Windows Server 2003 or another OS for every developer that they have.
In my case, all of our developers run CF on their local machines for development. We have a shared development server where builds are pushed out regularly. We also have a QA environment, and of course production. We've never had any issues with code being developed locally that won't run in our other environments due to OS incompatibility. Other than the OS (and in my case, the JVM version), all of our environments are identical. Since I don't do any actual development for our systems anymore, for me, it's a moot point.
While I think virtual machines are great, I think that they are no only starting to take off - and that's just at the server level (where we fully take advantage of virtualization). On the desktop, I think you have a lot longer to go before they are as common as other tools.
I should have mentioned that I'm current on all of my Windows service packs, updaters, etc. I'm also on the latest BIOS as well as drivers for all of my devices. Unfortunately, staying current didn't solve my problem.
I'm fairly convinced it's a video card driver issue with Java. If that's the case, it's either Sun, ATI, or Lenovo's problem.
Thanks so much for your posts on this subject.
I'm experiencing the bad_pool_header BSOD on my ThinkPad T43 / CF8 / Apache 2.
In my case it's a little different, but moving to the 1.4.2_09 JRE from the CFusionMX7 install we upgraded from stops it from crashing.
We installed CF8 just fine, the administrator works fine, but where we saw it crashing was trying to startup a model-glue based application. I messed around and what I saw so far is VERY strange: With JRE 1.5 or 1.6, it crashes trying to XMLParse() a (well formed XML) string longer than 996 bytes. Any shorter, and it's fine. Any longer, and Kaboom! Parsing the same string on CF8 under CF7's 1.4.2_09 JRE - not a problem.
I wonder what kind of I/O filter's are on my ThinkPad. Will have to investigate. (I'm not running any Altiris apps tho.)
Thoughts?
.jonah
( Also, In Step 4., it should say java.home instead of java_home. ;) )
Thanks for the catch on the typo.
Before I narrowed my issue down to Altiris software virtualization, I suspected my issue was driver related. I've read other accounts of the problem being with the NIC, Wireless card, or video card. Have you checked that you have the latest of each of those drivers?
If it isn't a driver issue, I'm not sure what else it would be. Can you image your machine, blow out everything, try a clean install of the OS, then try just installing CF and Apache? A pain to do for sure, but I'm wondering if you might not have an application installed somewhere that is causing the issue. Process of elimination?