Copyright © 1998 by Fabian Pascal. All Rights Reserved
Sidebar: Anatomy of a Troubleshoot
After migrating the NT installation I created on the Slot 1 system to the Super7 platform, NT generated blue screen STOP errors 1E, 50 and 7F, 1E being the most prevalent. Article Q103059 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (MSKB) "documents" such errors, but that is not very helpful.
Searches on the 7F and 50 did not produce relevant causes. Multiple occurrences of the 1E error pointed to different NT components (NTOSKRNL, KERNEL32.DLL, WIN32K.SYS), searches on which produced nothing either. A search on the 1E and 50 (more frequent) combination yielded one hit on DEC Alpha systems. Searches on 1E and on its description -- KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED -- produced 20 and 47 hits respectively, neither of which pertains to the circumstances under consideration.
At this point contacting Microsoft technical support was warranted. After much back-and-forth, they required the following information:
"Get as much information off the blue screen as possible and email that. But the best way to find out the cause would be to enable crash-dump in the System|Startup|Shutdown in Control Panel. Also make sure that the page file is at least as large as the installed RAM on the machine. On the next STOP error, zip the dump file and upload it to our FTP site."
Blue screens are annoying not only just because they occur, but particularly because they normally cannot be captured and, thus, must be written down. Fortunately, the BlueSave shareware utility (http://www.winternals.com) is the solution. At $99 it is not cheap, but it saves a lot of hassle if and when STOP errors occur and need to be documented.
Unfortunately, the blue screen information did not help. With
128MB of RAM, the DMP files generated by NT's crash-dump facility
were too large for email and took a while to FTP to MSFT at 33.6K.
After a delay due to the FTP site being down and long upload hassles,
three 128MB .DMP files were sent to Microsoft. There has been
no response to them.