Windows 8 gremlins

[johnpombrio]

Damn, I hate laptops that lock you out of anything useful in the BIOS. Sounds like a lot of these machines that are freezing up are laptops. Is there a log somewhere kept by Windows error reporting that may shed a clue on this?

 

[GMan]

Ya, if it's only freezing in normal mode but not freezing in safe mode, it is very likely a driver causing it. Perhaps an unnecessary driver such as GearASPIwdm.sys or just an older driver for your installed hardware that needs an update.

 

[johnpombrio]

When in doubt, BLAME THE VIDEO DRIVERS, heh. It was what bollixed up Vista and might be doing the same here. Try updating the driver or go back to an older driver. Next, my friend had USB 3.0 driver issues on his laptop so if you have them, try turning them off. Finally, see if there is a update for your network drivers besides on the manufacturer's web page. I had lockups due to networking issues (I think) so something to check.

I had one problem with my ASUS P8P67 mobo about sleeping and o/c that was only fixed by a BIOS update (a year later mind)- hopefully, it will not come to that...

 

[GMan]

Well, we can sort this out in a real way. How? Actually force a bsod to happen on purpose. Here is the simple way how:


Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters.
Go to Edit, select New | DWORD Value and name the new value CrashOnCtrlScroll.
Double-click the CrashOnCtrlScroll DWORD Value, type 1 in the Value Data textbox, and click OK.
Close the Registry Editor and restart Windows.

When you want to cause a BSOD, press and hold down the [Ctrl] key on the right side of your keyboard, and then tap the [ScrollLock] key twice. Now you should see the BSOD.

-------------

Here's how you remove the BSOD configuration after BSOD happens:

Launch the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters.
Select the CrashOnCtrlScroll value, pull down the Edit menu, and select the Delete command.
Close the Registry Editor and restart.

----------

Once it happens, C:\Windows\Minidump

Copy/paste files from there to any other folder. Zip or rar them. Attach the zip or rar here....then we're on the way.

 

[freelancer91]

Heh, my laptop doesn't have a scroll lock key. Let me see if I can dig up a keyboard....

EDIT: Ok, got my desktop's Sidewinder keyboard. Held right ctrl and pressed scroll lock twice and nothing happened.

EDIT 2: As for video drivers, earlier in this thread, I updated my drivers to the latest stable version. It hasn't helped.

 

[nbulp]

Hmm. But, what good is a memory dump, if the BSOD is not caused by (e.g.) a problematic driver?

 

[GMan]

Hmm. But, what good is a memory dump, if the BSOD is not caused by (e.g.) a problematic driver?

Simple. It shows all the drivers and dates. Even if there is only one suspect driver out of them all, I've been doing this so long, I would see it immediately.

 

[nbulp]

Heh, my laptop doesn't have a scroll lock key. Let me see if I can dig up a keyboard....

EDIT: Ok, got my desktop's Sidewinder keyboard. Held right ctrl and pressed scroll lock twice and nothing happened.

EDIT 2: As for video drivers, earlier in this thread, I updated my drivers to the latest stable version. It hasn't helped.

There is a new "Windows Update"-update for the network card! Try it! :O

 

[nbulp]

Crap :-\ It didn't help.

 

[freelancer91]

I know one way to trigger a BSoD. Back when I was hackintoshing, I found that if Windows was set up to run with the BIOS so that the SATA selection mode was ATA but it was switched to AHCI, then it would blue screen until it was switched back in the BIOS. I will try that now...

 

[freelancer91]

Hmmm...It triggered a blue screen, but I'm still not seeing a minidump folder. It even said that it was collecting data and was about to shutdown. I also checked to make sure that minidump wasn't a hidden folder. It still isn't there.

 

[nbulp]

I've actually installed Windows 8 in both SATA and IDE modes, just so see if it was the SATA-related driver that was problematic... Well, you know how that turned out...

 

[freelancer91]

Well, the blue screen occurs if you switch the SATA selection mode from AHCI to ATA or vice versa AFTER installation. It is possible to edit the registry prior to switching to avoid this blue screen, but this was a problem I encountered back when I was experimenting with running Mac OSX on my desktop. If you installed Windows with ATA mode selected, you had a problem because OSX will on'y work under AHCI mode.

 

[fafhrd]

Best buy seemed to think that the reason my computer was crashing was due to an optical drive failure. It apparently didn't work (although I haven't had any problems in Windows 7 since getting it fixed).

Impossible theory on their part. I don't want to put down a company or its hard workers, so I'll simply say that they tell customers things they want to hear. A faulty optical drive will not stop error a machine. The worst that would happen is the drive doesn't read discs.

I have to disagree with you about this, Gman - I had a Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7530B CD/DVD Rewritable that developed a kinked ribbon cable, which eventually shorted to the casing, killing the machine. Once the faulty device had been physically removed, all worked well. While it was failing, the symptoms were random freezing, on any and all of my multiboot OSs. I have had random freezing again recently - even a CHKDSK froze half way through. I've removed the CD/DVD ROM drive and no freeze-ups yet! I have yet to discover why this Drive has a fault.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Me too

Impossible theory on their part. I don't want to put down a company or its hard workers, so I'll simply say that they tell customers things they want to hear. A faulty optical drive will not stop error a machine. The worst that would happen is the drive doesn't read discs.

I have to disagree with you about this, Gman - I had a Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7530B CD/DVD Rewritable that developed a kinked ribbon cable, which eventually shorted to the casing, killing the machine.

I experienced something similar with one of my DVD drives.

The power connector (cable) was a bit dodgy and my PC had problems booting.
I noticed that the light didn't flash during boot up.
Using a different power connector solved the problem.

 

[freelancer91]

Is possible that this was in some way contributing to the problem. Prior to taking the device in to be repaired, it froze twice on Windows 7. It is entirely possible that Geek Squad didn't examine the Windows 8 partition to see what was wrong on it. It wouldn't surprise me, since the they could legitimately write off any problems experienced on the Developer Preview to being caused by the fact that it is an alpha.

What we should be focusing on now is how to trigger a blue screen. Most of the time, when my laptop experiences issues, it isn't a blue screen. The kind of problems I am getting are usually a complete operating system freeze with absolutely no warning. My only clue that anything has happened is that the computer responds to nothing from the touchpad or keyboard (with the exception of features like the keyboard backlight). If anything was moving on the screen, it suddenly freezes and if any sound was playing, the computer will continue to play whatever was playing at the millisecond the computer froze, resulting in a loud glitchy roar. The HDD light shows no activity and the only way to fix it is to hold the power button to reset the computer.

In addition to triggering a blue screen, we need to figure out why the computer isn't recording the small 256kb memory dump.

Any ideas?

 

[GMan]

Did you move the pagefile.sys from it's default location?

I did and when I tested the keyboard bsod method, it still made one fine, but on some other configs, moving it poses a problem.

 

[GMan]

Btw, here is how to use a USB keyboard to cause the crash. Just follow my other instructions as before:

With USB keyboards, you must enable the keyboard-initiated crash in the registry. In the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\kbdhid\Parameters, create a value named CrashOnCtrlScroll, and set it equal to a REG_DWORD value of 0x01 (1).

The first way I said (days ago) just works for a legacy PS/2 keyboard.

Forcing a System Crash from the Keyboard

 

[freelancer91]

Actually, right before you posted that, I looked at the directions on keyboardninja and noticed that too.

Also, I had to switch from a small memory dump (256k) to a kernel memory dump. For some reason, it wasn't creating the file. I then specified a specific file name rather than a folder to put it in. The result is a 327MB dump file (60MB when compressed). Eightforums wouldn't let me upload it so here is a dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/zbv8l7si7ir2u1g/OkQM9fRBYd/MEMORY.zip

 

[GMan]

That's a large style dump but it's all the same. Just takes longer to download, but my bandwidth isn't limited at all in any way and I'm fast....so we'll see in a few what may or may not be an issue.

I already see issues involving NVIDIA chipset. I'll have a more detailed post coming up.