McAfee 8.7i "Could not contact Filter Driver", On Access Scan Disabled

McAfee have recently released VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i, with various performance improvements over 8.5i. So we rolled it out using ePolicy Orchestrator, and then noticed some of the servers had the On-Access Scan disabled. Further inverstigation revealed the upgrade had been successful on these servers, but then the service was struggling to start reporting the following error in the application event log:

 

Event Type: Error
Event Source: McLogEvent
Event Category: None
Event ID: 5004
Date:  06/11/2008
Time:  10:17:22
User:  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: MACHINENAME
Description:
Could not contact Filter Driver.
 Error = 0x7d1 : The specified driver is invalid.

 

After trawling through the McAfee help forums, it turns out a lot of people are experiencing the same problem (another great example of product testing from McAfee) and it's to do with the system volume being a dynamic disk, which is a more common situation on servers - but it could equally affect workstations. The fix is to update the registry on the affected server, or wait till patch 1 (apparently due in February) before deploying 8.7i to anything with a dynamic disk.

 

Incidentally, if you've already deployed 8.7i and found this problem, retrograding to 8.5i doesn't seem to fix it - you'll need the registry update or patch.

 

Details of the registry fix are here - essentialy you'll be updating the path to mfeapfk, mfeavfk, and mfebopk which live under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\, with the full path to the driver - e.g. c:\windows\system32\drivers\mfeapfk.sys. You'll need to do this once 8.7i has finished installing, then simply start the McAfee McShield Service again - no reboot required.

 

As always, take care when editing the registry - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/256986/EN-US/

 

UPDATE 8/12/08

We've since observed this same error on Windows XP without dynamic disks, after a full disk check was performed. The same registry edit fixed the problem

 

UPDATE 10/12/08

The latest round of Windows updates has caused the problem to reoccur on servers that previously were fixed by the registry edit - slightly different error messages this time, and it was only fixed with a reinstall of Enterprise v8.7 and reapplying the registry fix above. Error 1:

 

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date:  09/12/2008
Time:  21:31:45
User:  N/A
Computer: MACHINENAME
Description:
The McAfee Inc. mfehidk service failed to start due to the following error:
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

 

Error 2:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7001
Date:  09/12/2008
Time:  21:31:45
User:  N/A
Computer: MACHINENAME
Description:
The McAfee Validation Trust Protection Service service depends on the McAfee Inc. mfehidk service which failed to start because of the following error:
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.