Physical Memory Dump

[Tiorted Snoil]

For you NT gurus....my PC will every how and then turn to a blue screen with what appears to be a bunch of memory address....it says "beginning phyiscal memory dump." I usually just turn it off because I have no idea what it is doing. What is it and what causes it?

 

[mathmajors]

Usually an NT OS file gone bad, driver conflict, or memory conflict.

 

[The Brain]

I say reformat... when you do that install all drivers... THEN go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download ALL the updates... this might take a little while, but well worth it once complete.

 

[mathmajors]

Originally posted by The Brain
I say reformat... when you do that install all drivers... THEN go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download ALL the updates... this might take a little while, but well worth it once complete.

It's probably the result of something you just changed, so unchange it. No need to reformat because of one error.

Enter NT via VGA mode and see if you get the problem, or pull up the Last Known Good Profile.

 

[jasper]

A physical memory dump (some folks call it a physical dump, I call it a core dump, mmmmhmmm) is caused when something flakes to the point of being a "System Failure." A lot of times they are caused by device drviers doing something they shouldn't. The dump process basically writes all of the instructions in your physical memory at that time to a binary file somewhere on your hard drive. There are tools that can allow someone with fairly advanced knowledge to try to degub the dump, hopefully to find out what caused it. This article might help if you want to try to analyze the dump.

But, at least in Windows 2000 (not sure about NT 4, but I imagine it's similar), I know you can turn off the dump and just have your machine restart whenever it runs into a system failure. Right Click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery. Just check Automatically Reboot and select none under Write Debugging Information.

 

[Couz]

That is known as the Blue Screen of Death. Most of the time you spend more time trying to debug the dump then it would take to reformat.

 

[mathmajors]

Originally posted by Couz
That is known as the Blue Screen of Death. Most of the time you spend more time trying to debug the dump then it would take to reformat.

Not if you know what you're doing.

In our profession, the problem is that someone always has something critical on the drive, because they acted like dumbasses and didn't use their server access to store files.

 

[Couz]

Everytime I've ever seen it I was able to reboot and get the important stuff off before reformatting.