Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis (webcast)

Oh no, not another BSOD.

There's a new on-demand webcast available from Microsoft ...
TechEd On-Demand Webcast: Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis The presenter is Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals fame, who has now become a Microsoft employee.

You can either watch it online or download it as a Windows Live file (.WMV format, for playing via what until recently was called the Windows Media Player). You can also download the accompanying PowerPoint presentation.

The webcast is a really good introduction to a complex subject.

I've installed Lotus Domino 7.0.1 server on a client's system and a number of virtual machines without any problems. However, on my main development/test systems soon after I lauhch the server it gives that fammouse Blue Screen Of Death. So my first use of the insights gained from this excellent TechEd presentation will be to decipher the meaning of this Domino crash.

The stop code was NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS ... That's a picture of it above, a little blurry and unclear as is my present understanding of what it signifies!

Apparently it means that "a higher-level driver has attempted to call a lower-level driver through the IoCallDriver interface, but there are no more stack locations in the packet. This will prevent the lower-level driver from accessing its parameters. This is a disastrous situation ..."

Note: This is the first time in many years that I've had a Windows crash for Lotus Domino server. My development/test system has an enormous amount of software loaded on it, so who knows what the cause might be. Wish me luck in debugging it!

UPDATE - 30 September 2006:
IBM has just released Lotus Domino 7.0.2 today. I eagerly downloaded and installed it, unfortunately with the same result. so it looks as if I really will have to do some crash dump analysis (which I was trying to avoid, hoping that this update would fix the problem)!

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Here's one handy resource for this sort of thing: Troubleshooting Windows STOP Messages

Incidentally, I created and uploaded this post using Microsoft's new blogging tool, Windows Live Writer, which lets you post blog entries directly from within Microsoft Internet Explorer. I found it considerably nicer to use than the native Blogger.com interface, with its tiny editing window.

UPDATE - 30 September 2006:
Today I summoned up the mental reserves to re-watch the TechEd On-Demand Webcast: Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis and the tried using WinDbg to debug the Blue Screen Of Death that appears soon after Domino Server 7.0.2 is started. But unfortunately the crash dump was quite minimal and inconclusive. It only seemed to point out some that there was sort of driver failure, and warned that the driver it identified mught not be the one actually responsible for the crash. Most obscure.! What to do now?

Oh, do I ever so much now need to vent my frustration with one of the Microsoft error message T-shirts from Errorwear

1 comment:

  1. Well now Andy (presumably working at Virtual Studio Pvt Ltd in New Delhi, India), your discourse (diatribe?) on streaming media might be instructive, but it bears no relationship whatsoever to this post about Windows crash dump analysis! In fact, it looks like blog spam to me.

    Would you like a million people (or maybe fewer) who might read this article to bug you by calling you at Phone: +91-11-41638540?

    And since I see that your company e-mail address is info@vsworld.com -- got that? it's info@vsworld.com (in plain text rather than non-machine-readable Flash Video format on your company site) -- perhaps a swarm or plague of e-mail harvesters will extract this mail address this comment and flood your company with even more spam.

    DO NOT CREATE SPAM, Mr Andy, DO NOT CREATE SPAM!

    ReplyDelete

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