How to ask for help with a BSOD problem

Many people believe that the swap needs to be on the same drive. That's not accurate though.

I have mine on my G drive which is a SATA II Caviar Black 1TB drive, attached to a controller card.

My OS (system and boot) drive is D, which is attached to the motherboard and is a WD 400 GB drive.

My pc creates minidumps fine....well up until a week a go when I stopped having them after I helped MOTU repair something in the driver for my Traveler professional audio interface.
(I would get bsod for years every few days showing MOTUfwa.sys)

Now it's all smooth sailing since they repaired the errors I've shown them in dumps.

In specific cases with certain .dmp's created under certain conditions it can be a problem depending on which component or driver is failing and needs to be accessed

Until we know why .dmp files aren't being produced your observations may not be helpful in this case

How's this for an observation?

From her post - "%systemroot%\MEMORY.DMP"

Do you see anything there about why she couldn't find the minidumps in the minidump folder?

Simple fact is that as long as there is a page/swap file setup and being used on the system anywhere, that is all that is needed in regards to the actual page file, for the system being able to produce crash dumps.

I tried to be nice about it in my last reply. Now I'm just being factual is all.

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Hi -

For Kernel memory dumps to be produced. . .

- Page file must be on OS drive (see kb307973 below)
- Page file base allocation size must be > than installed physical RAM
- Windows Error Reporting (WER) system service should be set to MANUAL
- Set page file to system managed, OS drive

Set System Crash/ Recovery Settings to "Kernel Memory Dump" - this will produce. . .
--> a Full Kernel Memory Dump - c:\windows\memory.dmp
--> a Mini Kernel dump c:\windows\minidump

The Full Kernel is overwritten each BSOD; a new mini kernel dump is created w/ different name for each BSOD

To check your system's "Recoveros" (Recovery) and Page File settings via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), download the EXE file - save to Desktop. RIGHT-click on EXE icon, select "Run as Administrator".

http://jcgriff2.com/0x2/WMIC_Recoveros_Pagefile_04-2010_jcgriff2_html.exe

IE 8 screen will open with the results.

For additional information, please see kb307973 --> How to configure system failure and recovery options in Windows

If no dump files are produced, the reason may be due to catastrophic hardware failure. The system would come down so fast in which case Windows 7 will do all possible to save itself and therefore may not have the time to produce a kernel memory dump - mini or full. The Event Viewer logs or WERCON would be a good source to verify that a BSOD has in fact occurred.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

.

Hey JC...glad to see ya around man.

Those things are what Microsoft says, sure. They still aren't all absolutely true.


- Page file must be on OS drive (see kb307973 below) -

Must be is wrong. My system is proof.

- Windows Error Reporting (WER) system service should be set to MANUAL

Should be - alright, I can accept this because should be does not = must.
I have the service disabled, which basically means not necessary whatsoever.

As I said, my system produces minidumps well.
Anyhow, it'd be great seeing ya in a few of the bsod thread if you have the time, around here. I know you're busy though. Again, good seeing ya around.

Hi TG -

Good to see you too.

Please run the WMI app and see what it says.

Here is the output from my Windows 7 x64 system -->

http://jcgriff2.com/0x2/wmic_recoveros_page.html

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

.

Sure,

I ran the wmic recoveros command but I can't seem to figure out how to make it dump to a log. The results are all out of order and such, currently...where you can't really make much sense of it.

How did you get it into the chart as in your link?

I used the EXE app in post #14 --> http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-...tml#post161508

http://jcgriff2.com/0x2/WMIC_Recoveros_Pagefile_04-2010_jcgriff2_html.exe

Download & save to Documents. RIGHT-click on EXE app, select "Run as Administrator"

An IE8 screen will open with results.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

.

Hello,

I believe there is a some registry key method where we will create a Registry value and when it hangs / Freezes we have press Ctrl + scroll lock (2 times) but not sure where to add those values. Maybe John is aware of that method.

- Captain

I don't have a host to serve the html page. I also don't want my machine name made public for security reasons. So I took a screenshot and quickly edited the machine name out. Here it is: