MSYS2 + win7: 'invalid crypto engine'

I am having trouble with MSYS2 under windows 7 (x64): “pacman” commands do not work, and MSYS2 complains about an ‘invalid crypto engine’.

Judging by what I have read about this apparently common issue is that it can have many causes and that it can be time consuming to identify your particular problem and fix it.

So, since it can be assumed that through MSYS2 many people lose significant amounts of time (I already did), are there better alternatives and shouldn’t the standard “how to set up your dev environment” recommendations at least warn us about the problems with MSYS2 and mention alternatives?

If there is no substitute, the addition of a troubleshooting paragraph with a collection of the most common problems + how to fix them would be very nice to have.

In themeantime: Did you come across the ‘invalid crypto engine’ issue? How did you fix it?

Thanks a lot!

I’ve had no problems, but I believe others do. Considering how widely used MSYS2 is (compared to VCV Rack), it doesn’t seem realistic to ask VCV to prepare a document on trouble-shooting MSYS2.

Is this a fresh MSYS2 install? Can you post the error message or a screenshot? I’ve never seen this problem, so it’s wrong to assume that just because you have it, everyone has it.

Also note that Windows 7 support ends in less than a year. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281 Once Microsoft drops support, most software companies will drop support as well.

Iv’e not seen this issue myself, but a quick google search shows others with the issue also. A few questions come to mind.

Is MSYS2 installed in the root of C drive? C:\msys64
I’m not too sure if running in safe mode can help but, what happens if you try to run in safe mode with networking?
Are there any programs from the following list that are installed? disabling those help?
https://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#faq.using.bloda

I had this error once on a different machine–I think it was a firewall issue in my case.

I assume you’ve seen https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/393 (which also mentions the Big List of Dodgy Apps that @Coirt linked).

In my experience (not extensive) most Cygwin and Cygwin-derived issues come from the BLODA.

Thank you all very much! In the meantime I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand what is going on, and my final suspicion is that there is indeed a conflict with something else that has been installed before. I went for the simplest solution: Bought another HDD and installed Windows 10, then MSYS2. No problems. Everything (Rack 0.6x and Rack 1.0 + the plugins) compiles and runs nicely.

@Vortico: I’ll post a screenshot when I get to the studio next time. Here is what I remember from searching/reading: Apparently, the ‘invalid crypto engine’ problem is known but it has many potential reasons. A common claim is that MSYS2 itself is not the cause of the problem. So I decided to have a clean, dedicated Rack development system, and that works fine now :slight_smile:

1 Like

An expensive solution but glad you got it working :+1:

~50€ for a cheap HDD and a Win 10 license. Nothing compared to the time I lost…

Here is the screenshot

grafik

Have you tried to completely disable all antivirus when you do that? Otherwise I would completely nuke MSYS2, clean up after it and start again.

I had the same problem a few days ago, there was a pending update to pacman which causes the trouble

i ve downloaded it here : http://repo.msys2.org/msys/x86_64/pacman-5.1.3-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

copied it in /var/cache/pacman/pkg

made pacman -Suy → so it founds it on local filesystem and installed it

voila :slight_smile:

Thanks! Just tried the update and it works!