ntbtlog - very big, with lot of 'did not load driver'...Pls help!!!!

Probably the original poster has gotten his solution or given up. But having just gone through this myself, I want to post a reply just in case someone has this problem again in future.

So you get this c:\windows\nbtlog.txt file by repeatedly pressing F8 while booting and then selecting to produce a boot log.

nbtlog.txt is concatenated each time a log is produced.

1. So the first thing to do is separate out the old junk by renaming the current nbtlog.txt already there. (For example, nbtlog_upto_2013-01-10.txt)

2. Re-boot to produce a fresh new log.

3. You'll probably see most of those "did not load driver" messages are gone. There should be just a few left, for hardware you don't have or duplicate load attempts where an earlier load succeeded.

4. IF you want to proceed to steps 5 & 6 it is a good idea to run a backup first. (At least create a Windows System Restore Point.)

5. Optional. Run Driversweeper, looking for drivers for stuff you know you don't have. (You have a laptop, so you won't have updated your video card or network card, but possibly you'll find Dell installed extra drivers.)

6. Optional. Run CCleaner to clean up your registry.

7. Rename the current nbtlog.txt again.

8. Reboot with boot logging enabled and check your new nbtlog.txt.

9. You'll probably see most of those "did not load driver" messages are gone. There should be just a few left, for hardware you don't have. You might also see them where the driver was loaded earlier. If it is just a few, don't worry about them. (I get this for vga.sys, NDProxy.SYS (4 times), srv.sys.)

10. If you did steps 5 & 6 and still have a lot of "did not load" messages, post each one in a reply here. What they are for and whether they were previously loaded is probably important to figuring out why they are there.


If you look through your old renamed nbtlog.txt you'll see the various windows versions/service packs and the time stamp before each concatenated log. A couple date to a month before I got my computer. The others, I suspect they have to do with updates to drivers, software installations, and old safe boots.

I have a Dell too (Dell XPS 9000 desktop aka Dell Studio 435T), and I too had a whack of those messages. Maybe doing boot-logging automatically during update re-boots is a Dell-specific default? I can see where it would be handy if something went wrong with an update, but it does mean a lot of junk builds up over time.