My first Windows Vista Beta 2 BSoD - Basics of WinDbg crash dump analysis

bart — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 00:51:00 GMT

It had to happen sooner or later, running a beta of an operating system intensively day after day. Okay, it isn't funny to have a Blue Screen of Death (btw, did you know the RSoD feature has been dropped from Vista?) but as my fellow community member - and WinDbg expert - Hans De Smaele always tells: "stay calm, open up WinDbg and analyze the crash". So that's what I did and what I'm showing you in this webcast.

PS: Of course I did report the bug through the Microsoft Beta Client feedback tool as well, including the WinDbg information.

Additional information:

My crash was a DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (0x0000009F) BSoD (never seen before). More info (for previous Windows releases) can be found on the support site.
WinDbg can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/debugstart.mspx (see link "Install Debugging Tools for Windows 32-bit Version").
The used symbol path in this webcast is SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
When the system crashes, don't power off the machine immediately. Instead, wait till the crash dump has been generated. You can configure the crash dump behavior through System Properties, tab Advanced, Startup and Recovery. A kernel memory dump will do the job (typically stored to %systemroot%\memory.dmp).
Don't forget to grab a copy of Hans' whitepaper on WinDbg over here.

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My first Windows Vista Beta 2 BSoD - Basics of WinDbg crash dump analysis