[Lujan]

I've been getting various BSODs that point to a bum driver on my computer somewhere. I've been trying to determine which it is using XP's verifier.exe program.

If I "automatically select all drivers installed on this computer" I get a BSOD upon booting with the following stop code:

0x000000C4 (0x0000003C, 0x00000000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000).


However, if I "select driver names from a list" and choose all of the drivers listed by default, I get no error. I suppose that means the bum driver is not located in /windows/drivers, but since its time consuming to select other .sys files throughout my computer, I was hoping someone could help me out by interpretting the error code or suggesting another shortcut. Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[OldGrayGary]

Hi Lujan


First of all - see if there's any relevant information to your trouble with the Driver Verification tool in Microsoft's overview of that tool --- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617 --- for example, note that there are known issues with IO Verification if "Deadlock Detection" is enabled on a system with Norton Antivirus [which has a fairly large installed base].

Second - can you provide an example of a BSOD that occurs when you are not using the Driver Verification tool? There should be examples already stored in your EventViewer logs. These should specifically point to modules & help with your trouble-shooting. [Start/Control Panel/Performance and Maintanence/Administrative Tools/EventViewer ... right-click on an event and select "Properties" to view the full details].

Research several instances, and see if there are persistent correlations between the errors and specific modules. If the errors seems random in nature, it could be a more widespread data-corruption problem - that just happens to have nailed a driver or two. Data corruption can be traced to hardware and hardware configuration issues - incorrect Bios settings & timings, faulty memory, or faulty hard drive, hard drive cable, incorrect cabling, damaged motherboard port ...etc... If the errors do indeed seem to strike random modules, test the basic hardware: memory ( http://www.memtest.org ) --- and hard drive ( http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287 ), and check in on your Bios Settings to ensure they look OK.

If the errors seem to indicate specific modules again and again - we might have a suspect to analyze.

If the situation is fairly recent, and the diagnostics do not point to a hardware problem, for a quick fix you could always try a System Restore from Safe Mode, using a restore point from before the first appearance of the BSODs.

Best of luck
. . . Gary