Thursday, June 19, 2008

How to debug Blue Screens

Hello boys and girls, let me tell you my problem.

A month ago I've upgraded to this new system:
Intel Quad Core Q9300
AsRock Penryl 1600SLI-110DB
Nvidia Gforce 9600 GT
I've kept the RAM, low quality DDR2 RAM (I think this is the reason for my BSODs).
I've got also a Firewire PCI card and an Audigy SE soundcard.

Until I'll show you my blue screen and my debug information I'll tell you how to debug Blue Screen Of Death information to see what is wrong.

I'll copy some information from Microsoft support website, I hope they don't mind because they are the good guys.

1) After the first blue screen go to your windows partition and look in windows directory for a subdirectory named minidump and see if you've got any files win there.

If you've got files like that MiniMMDDYY-01.dmp (Month, Day, Year), even if you don't see .dmp you are alright.

2) Now that you know you have files to debug download first Windows Symbol Packages (you'll see the link for your OS at the bottom of the page) and install it, usually installs itself on c:\windows\symbols if C is your windows drive and "windows" is your windows directory.

3) Install Debugging tools for Windows 32-bit version or 64-bit versio, make sure you've downloaded the right one for your OS.

4) (from Microsoft)

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
2. Change to the Debugging Tools for Windows folder. To do this, copy and pasting the following at the command prompt, and then press ENTER:
cd c:\program files\debugging tools for windows (x86)
or
cd c:\program files\debugging tools for windows (x64)
3. To load the dump file into a debugger, type one of the following commands, and then press ENTER:
windbg -y SymbolPath -i ImagePath -z DumpFilePath

If you have the windows installed on C drive and in directory Windows just modify and copy this line:

windbg -y c:\windows\symbols -i c:\windows\i386 -z c:\windows\minidump\MiniMMDDYY-XX.dmp

Replace MiniMMDDYY-01.dmp with your minidump file name and a windows like this will appear:



And at the end of the page you'll see for example:

Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information.

BugCheck 1000007F, {d, 0, 0, 0}

Probably caused by : ntoskrnl.exe ( nt!RtlPrefetchCopyMemory+31 )

Followup: MachineOwner


After that you can post everything on a forum and ask for help.

You can click !analyze -v for a deep inspection.

No comments: