Troubleshooting GPU Mining

Troubleshooting GPU mining

Upgrade Awesome Miner version

The first step when troubleshooting is to upgrade Awesome Miner to the latest version. Either click the blue Menu button and Check for updates or visit the Download page on the web site. The currently installed version is displayed in the lower left corner of the application.

If Remote Agent is used, please ensure that the same software version of Awesome Miner main application and Awesome Miner Remote Agent is installed.

Upgrade GPU drivers and disable overclocking

Please make sure that either the latest GPU drivers are used, or the GPU drivers that are recommended by the author of the mining software are used.

If any overclocking is made, restore the clock speed to the default values to ensure a stable baseline before proceeding with any overclocking.

Mining software isn't starting correctly

If a Managed Miner or Managed Profit Miner isn't starting correctly, click on the Diagnostics button in the toolbar. This will launch the mining software, include information about the command line arguments Awesome Miner used to launch the software and also any output or error messages from the mining software. Please review any error messages as they will often include indications about the problem.

"The system cannot find the file specified" or
"The directory name is invalid"
If this error is displayed, Awesome Miner tried to download the mining software, but security software on your computer removed the miner software before Awesome Miner could start it. Some of the mining software being downloaded can be flagged as threats according to security and anti-virus software, as they sometimes are used by malicious software. Please follow the guide how to Configure exclusions in Windows Defender.
Ccminer: "Your system does not support CUDA 9.0 API" or
EWBF Zcash miner: "no CUDA-capable device is detected"
This error indicates that the GPU drivers are too old. Please visit the nVidia web site to upgrade the GPU drivers.
Sgminer: "All devices disabled, cannot mine!" or
"Failed to init GPU thread 0, disabling device 0" or
"All devices disabled, cannot mine!"
Sgminer is only intended to be used with AMD GPU, but can sometimes detect an onboard Intel GPU or nVidia GPU and try using that device. To prevent this, add a command line argument to Sgminer. The instructions are different depending on if profit switching (Managed Profit Miner) is used on not.

Managed Profit Miner: Right click on the miner and select "Edit Profit profile". Select Sgminer in the list of mining software and click Configure. Add the following in the Command Line section:
--gpu-platform 1

Managed Miner: Open the Properties of the miner, go to the Command Line section and enter the following:
--gpu-platform 1

"Stratum authorization error" or
"Authorization failed"

This indicates that the mining software is unable to connect to the pool with the configured worker name or wallet address. For pools that requires a Bitcoin address as identifier, please verify that a valid Bitcoin address has been provided.

For pools that requires registration first (Mining Pool Hub for example), please ensure that the same username for the pool web site is used together with a worker name. A typical worker name can be: yourusername.1. Please see the pool documentation for details.

The code execution cannot proceed bacause MSVCR120.DLL/VCRUNTIME140.DLL was not found.

See the section about prerequisites for mining software below for links to download the missing packages.

Failed to start miner process: InvalidApplication

This mining software requires a 64-bit version of Windows, while you are running on a 32-bit version.

"Process has exited, so the requested information is not available" or
no messages at all

This indicates either a crash or instant shutdown of the launched mining software. Please check that the prerequisites for the mining software are installed.

To troubleshoot further, first run the Diagnostics to see the command executed by Awesome Miner, then open a command prompt and manually run the same command to see if any additional messages from the mining software is provided.

What to report?

In case the problem cannot be resolved, please contact the Awesome Miner support and include the following:

Select the miner that isn't working correctly and make sure it's stopped. Click the Diagnostics button in the toolbar and provide the complete output.

Mining software is crashing after a while

If Awesome Miner successfully launches the mining software and it starts mining, any crashes later on is in general not related to Awesome Miner. Awesome Miner can detect these crashes, provide notifications and restart the mining software. However, if the crash happens in software outside of the Awesome Miner application, there is no feature in Awesome Miner to correct this problem. Instead the author of the crashing mining software should be contacted for a resolution. Please refer to discussion forums and mining software documentation for links to each of the mining software launched by Awesome Miner.

Troubleshooting:

Try to isolate which mining software or which algorithm that is crashing. If the profit switcher is used, please see the section below about Disable specific algorithm or software from profit switcher.
Disable any security software completely. Although it's often enough to specify a folder to be excluded from scans, in some instances security software can prevent the mining process from being stable.
If the mining is running via the Remote Agent, please verify that only a single Awesome Miner main application is controlling the Remote Agent. If more than one Awesome Miner is controlling the same Remote Agent, the mining software may restart.
For nVidia GPU's: Go to the nVidia Control Panel and enable SLI support. Then disable SLI support again.

What to report?

In most scenarios, crashes in mining software cannot be resolved from an Awesome Miner point of view. Crashes in mining software should primarily be reported to the author of the crashing software.

However, if there are strong indications that Awesome Miner is doing something incorrectly, please report the following information:

Diagnostics output: Select the miner that isn't working correctly and make sure it's stopped. Click the Diagnostics button in the toolbar and provide the complete output.
Log files: Provide the Awesome Miner log file, via the toolbar Tools -> Log File. If the mining is running via the Remote Agent, provide the log file for Remote Agent in addition to the Awesome Miner log file. The log can be accessed from the Remote Agent icon in the lower right corner of the screen, where the right-click menu has the option Log File.
Description: Include a good description of the problem, together with the time the problem occured. Do not send log files without specifying what to look for. Also specify which troubleshooting steps that have been taken already.

General GPU mining troubleshooting tips

Install prerequisites for mining software
Ccminer and EWBF miner requires Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013
Dstm Miner requires Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2015
Disable specific algorithm or software from profit switcher
In some instances, it can be a specific algorithm or a specific mining software that isn't compatible with your setup. To exclude mining software, open the Profit Profile properties dialog. Right click on the miner and select Edit Profit Profile. In the Profit Profile Properties, uncheck the mining software and algorithms to exclude from the profit switcher.
More help on mining software configuration
Please refer to discussion forums and mining software documentation for additional help on GPU mining.

Getting additional help with GPU mining software

Awesome Miner includes support for launching several popular mining software. However, product support is not given on any of these external mining applications as the respective development team is responsible for their software.

Questions about how to get a specific computer or GPU to work with mining are not part of the Awesome Miner support. If the GPU mining software cannot be started manually from the command line, the problem is outside the scope of Awesome Miner and no support will be given. If the mining software can be started outside Awesome Miner, then full guidance will be given how to make the same configuration in Awesome Miner.

The first step when troubleshooting why the GPU mining isn't working is to ensure that the the GPU drivers are up-to-date. It's also important to ensure that any overclocking isn't making the GPU's unstable.

For questions about which command line parameters to use for specific mining software, please refer to the readme-file or documentation for this specific software. If the information cannot be found, please contact the development team for the mining software using the links below.

Links to support, documentation and discussions about specific mining software