Local scan wont complete

What happens if you do the scan with your external drives unplugged?

The scan still does not complete.

Edit:

I have also tried creating custom scans for each drive and the only ones that finish are for the small ones.  It always quits before finishing the larger drives.

Does the log file indicate any specific error associated with the failure?

No, this is a copy of the bottom part of one of the local logs

Scan name: "Macintosh HD"
Scan items:
Path: / enabled: yes
Configuration:
Scan inside archives and compressed files: Yes
Automatically clean up threats: No
Action on infected files: Report only
Live Protection enabled: Yes

Immediate scan started at 2012-08-01 09:57:26 -0500

It does not say completed or failed or anything else.

For what it's worth, I'm having the same problem.  I just downloaded Sophos 8.0.6 this week when I upgraded to Mt Lion.  I can scan individual folders, but it cannot complete a complete disk scan.  I have over 6 million files and it scans for a few hours and then just quits with no message or notification.  

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ceasley wrote:

For what it's worth, I'm having the same problem.  I just downloaded Sophos 8.0.6 this week when I upgraded to Mt Lion.  I can scan individual folders, but it cannot complete a complete disk scan.  I have over 6 million files and it scans for a few hours and then just quits with no message or notification.  

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Try a custom scan that scans the entire internal drive... does that work?

I tried to do a custom scan of just my Machintosh HD.  It seemed to be working fine, but ended up quiting before it finished and it still says "this scan has never been completed".  I do think it stops scanning when the computer sleeps, but in this case I continued to work on the computer so it would not sleep.  It was running in the background, but just now when I checked on it again, the program had quit again without finishing.  I'm very discouraged about this.  With the last virus protection program that I owned I had it set up to scan the whole drive every night in the middle of the night.  It worked every time and it didn't matter that the computer was sleeping.

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ceasley wrote:

I tried to do a custom scan of just my Machintosh HD.  It seemed to be working fine, but ended up quiting before it finished and it still says "this scan has never been completed".  I do think it stops scanning when the computer sleeps, but in this case I continued to work on the computer so it would not sleep.  It was running in the background, but just now when I checked on it again, the program had quit again without finishing.  I'm very discouraged about this.  With the last virus protection program that I owned I had it set up to scan the whole drive every night in the middle of the night.  It worked every time and it didn't matter that the computer was sleeping.

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You should be able to do that with this one too.  Something is causing a failure -- this is non-standard behaviour.  Would you be able to create custom scans for different segments of your computer to isolate where the failure is occuring? I'm guessing it's likely a large archive file somewhere, but nothing beats a real-world test.

We have this problem with the Enterprise version as well.   My guess is that when Sophos actually releases a new definitions update (which I believe is every 4 hours?) then the engine update makes the scan stop.

I worked around this to do a full scan of my computer (which took 9 hours, btw) by changing the Auto-Update preference setting from every 1 hour to every 1 day.

Then I toggled it back to 1 hour after the full scan was done.

YMMV...

Thanks for that.  I will try that option.  If that still doesn't work, then I will try scanning each directory separately.