Monday, 25 February 2013

Troubleshooting System Instability– The MDOP Crash Analyzer Wizard

It is our preference to have Software Assurance and MDOP on all desktop operating systems in a client site. The SA benefits have been growing leaps and bounds over the last few years with MDOP being the cream of the crop.

We need to test a Toshiba Tecra R950 for some lockup issues.

The machine that we have the Crash Analyzer Wizard (a feature of DaRT via MDOP) has been around a few years.

After a couple of Next clicks we ended up with this:

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That was one too many clicks since the files we need to analyze are MiniDump files pulled from the affected machine’s MiniDump folder. However, it’s nice to see that the machine we examined has not had a problem for about three years now! :)

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The above check mark is the one we so blithely past by without unchecking. ;)

After unchecking that option and clicking next we get to choose our file:

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And click Next . . .

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Note that there are a couple of prerequisites for the tool to work:

Now, there are most certainly freebie tools out there that can run this task. But, none of them have been as simple and straightforward to get going as the Crash Analyzer Wizard.

In our first DMP we see:

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And, in our second dump we see:

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Both of our crashes were on the same driver. So, we have the most current ATI/AMD driver on its way down from Toshiba’s support site.

To cap it all off, the driver version indicated in Device Manager versus the individual file’s versions can be quite confusing since the files themselves have all sorts of version numbers.

Hopefully we see the problem fixed after this. Otherwise we may need to RMA this unit for a failed video subsystem. As a point of reference the Toshiba Tecra unit is an R950-00N (Canadian model).

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
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