Find Cause of Blue Screen of Death

I know all of you have seen the Blue Screen of Death. We all hate it and most all of us have no clue what it means. Ask anyone and they will tell you is due to some new hardware or software. What if you have not installed any new hardware or software and you get the Blue Screen of Death just out of the blue? What do we make of all the errors it gives us? You can try googling the error codes but they don't usually help.

In this article I will tell you my own experience with some recent BSDs and how I found out what they were cause by. (Tech people who don't want to read what happen and just want to know how to do this scroll down) Well some BSDs will tell you what cuased the problem. But not in my case, every 2-5 hours I would get the same one:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

and some error codes at the bottom. But as some of you may have noticed with all BSDs they all say at the bottom

Beginning memory dump...
Memory dump file complete

What is this memory dump? The memory dump is a file the computer creates that gives more details on the problem. They are the key! So how do we use them? We don't work for Microsoft! Well you don't have to! Here is what I did and what I always do after I get a BSD.

Step1: Check system events(Start->right click "My computer" and click on "Manage"->Events and Logs->System) I always look into what my computer was doing right before it crashed...in my case I saw that 1 min before it crashed each time(it crashed 5 times now) it would update the clock.

Step2: Check to see if this service is needed(in my case well yeah my clock needs to be updated)

Step3: I wish I had more info on these crashes...ask myself how do I open these dump files?

Step4: I found windows debugger program that can read .dmp files (dump files) Download program.

Step5: open dump file and find that problem is cuased by "systemtimeset-k"

Tech people to do this do these steps....


Step 1: Download & install Windows Debugger found here- Install Debugging Tools for Windows 32-bit Version

Step 2: Open the debugger and go to File->Symbol File Path

Step 3: Enter the file path

Code:

_NT_SYMBOL_PATH=srv*c:\mysymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;cache*c:\mysymbols
[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/USERNAME/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/USERNAME/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg[/IMG]

Step 4: Go to File->Open Crash Dump

Dump files are located at

Code:

C:\Windows\Minidump

Open the most recent one



Step 5: Let it load and scroll down to find your problem



If your a computer person you might want to click the !analyze -v link. But if your not just google the win32k.sys and you'll find it what it is(I found it to just be a random error but who knows maybe "TimersProc" means the computer was updating the clock?


Well I hope this helps alot of you and if you have any questions feel free to ask and if you need some help with a dump file I can look at it for you just send me a message.