unresolved computer crash mystery...

[Amaan]

Hi

I have a PIII based system that crashes with basic operating system operations. Symptoms under Win2k/WinNT:

1) Using Windows Explorer to copy or move files will crash Explorer.exe, and launch DrWatson32.exe, and then explorer.exe starts again.

2) Opening too many applications (say Outlook and Photoshop and 2 or 3 browsing windows) crashes Explorer along with a couple of the currently opened apps and launches DrWatson32.exe

I am using Windows 2k Pro. I had the same problem with Win NT SP6a. Ironically, all works perfectly well under Win 98! If I use another file-browsing software, like ACDsee browser to copy/move files, all works perfectly well under WinNT/Win2k!

On Win NT, just after crashing I would get an error mesg "File System Error (1026)"...On Win2k, it doesn't bother giving an error msg at all. Just crashes.

If I open huge files in Photoshop, after a while it gives me a msg "Error writing to drive. Sorry this error is fatal", and then crashes and launches drwatson32.exe

I have an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard (with latest BIOS), 256 MB PC100 memory, Pentium III 500MHz (Slot 1), and Quantum Fireball lct.13 13Gig HDD.

And here's the strangest thing of them all. I have seen this bug on 3 different machines. All crash the same way. The machine where I used to work (an Acer system), the machine at home, and the machine where I work now!!! I am now beginning to think that it's me who causes the crash, coz in over a year I have not been able to solve it, and nobody seems to have heard about this symptom, and even if I shift countries and computers, I still get the same problem

Twice I have tried chaning Hard drives (from Quantum to Seagate). No luck.
I reinstalled win 2k pro. worked fine for 2 weeks. but then started crashing again.

I have almost given up. Am about to order new Mushkin memory, as that may solve the problem.

anybody out there who has a fix for this?

amaan

 

[Jiggz]

Since everything works perfectly under Win98 this has to be a driver issue for Win2K. Did you do a clean slate install of Win2K? Or did you do an upgrade? Try doing a clean slate installation and make sure you have the latest and greatest Win2K drivers for your components.

 

[boran]

ehm sounds to me like DR watson is causing some problems ... did you try disabling it and where the crashes still there ?

 

[Amaan]

yep, all the drivers 4 the motherboard r new. i tried a clean win2k installation, but it didn't help either. and this bug i have seen on 3 different motherboards. One from Acer, the next from Intel, and the latest on from Gigabyte. So I suppose this is not a motherboard related issue. RAM perhaps?

Amaan

 

[Amaan]

Dr. Watson is only launched to write debugging info after the computer has crashed....i think.

 

[obenton]

I had much the same sort of problem when running w2k with BX chipset on an ATA66 controller. Symptoms varied, depending on which system or program files became corrupted over time. Problem vanished when I moved HD to a standard IDE33 controller.

 

[boran]

<< Dr. Watson is only launched to write debugging info after the computer has crashed....i think. >>



hehe didnt knew that, thanx for the info ...

 

[Nevo]

<< Dr. Watson is only launched to write debugging info after the computer has crashed....i think. >>



Exactly. When an exception occurrs, the OS looks for an exception handler to take care of it. Many time the OS handles the exception (such as a page fault, which is totally normal but is handled internally as an exception) and the app never knows an exception occurred. Some exceptions must be handled by the application. If the OS cannot find an exception handler to take care of the exception, it launches the &quot;debugger&quot; pointed to be HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Currentversion\AeDebug

Calling Dr. Watson a &quot;debugger&quot; is being generous. All Dr. Watson really does is pop up a dialog box that says &quot;something went wrong,&quot; and writes a user.dmp file, which is a dump of the user mode address space of the process that faulted (very similar to the memory.dmp you get when NT/2K/XP crashes with a BSOD).

This dump file, in skilled hands, can be used to analyze what happened. The problem is, very few people have these skills. Most of those people work for Microsoft and use these tools to debug their code as they write components of the OS.

Unfortunately, tracing the root cause of this issue is probably impractical. You can search the KB for the addresses at which the exceptions occur, but in all honesty you're not likely to find anything.

I would try an in-place upgrade first. Boot to the W2K CD and choose the &quot;repair&quot; option, and have W2K repair process run.

Don't, however, try that with an NT4 installation. If you have SP3 or later on your machine (and we all do), the repair process will ruin the machine. The repair process (among other things) copies all of the OS files from the NT4 CD to your hard drive. Unfortunately, in doing so, it reverts all files that were replaced by a service pack back to their original version. Changes made in SP3 and later will make your system unbootable if you do this.