BSOD shortly after login, also when waking up from sleep

Hi folks,

Just upgraded my laptop to Win8Pro. This is running on a Bootcamp partition on a late 2011 MacBook Pro. The machine seems to go through phases of stability and then extreme instability (currently on my 3rd full clean install). BSODs seem to happen primarily shortly after boot and login, and rarely if the system has been running for more than a couple minutes. It also seems to sleep when closing the lid, but then BSODs directly after opening the lid.

I looked through the dmp files using BlueScreenView and see that the primary error is a BAD_POOL_HEADER (0x00000019) but not sure where to go from there to identify the actual culprit. Also looked through the evt logs and see that there is an error loading cdrom and dam drivers, but those errors also occur when BSODs aren't occurring. A little background - this machine does not have any optical drive, both HDD and the SuperDrive have been replaced by SSDs. I set the startup for both of those drivers to 3 (manual) in the registry.

Thanks for looking.

Welcome
Your problem seems to be caused by a driver. Update driver or uninstall the appropriate software.

Productname:
Mac HAL Driver

Description:
Mac HAL Driver

Company:
Apple Inc.







Various

Thanks Rich. That appears to be a core driver, not sure about uninstalling it. I'll have a look around and see what I can find about it. Thanks for locating the problem.

You can update by going to the website or just uninstall.
You may want to uninstall the software after making a system restore point, so you can put it back if you still get BSODs.
Good Luck

For anyone else having this problem on a MacBook, I think I've found at least part of the problem. Go into Device Manager and disable the Generic PnP Monitor driver. After seeing several articles about problems changing screen brightness (disable adaptive brightness) and noticing that even with that disabled, the monitor seems to choose its own brightness setting at boot, I gave that a try and it seems to work.

I tested further by re-enabling the monitor driver and then trying to fiddle around with the built in brightness buttons. Immediate BSOD.

Of course you can uninstall Bootcamp and completely rule it out, but that will be very counter-productive and make even more things not work. For now, I'll keep the Bootcamp package and try to wait patiently for Apple to release a new set of drivers.