BSOD on Dell Vostro 1500

mac173 · 26 Aug 2010

I have been experiencing an increase in BSOD's over the last month. From the minidump file, it seems I was averaging about 2 per month, but it has gone up fast this month. I upgraded to Windows 7 in late November of '09, with a clean install of the 64 bit version. I upgraded all my drivers at that time.

The crash errors I see at the time of the BSOD make me think I have driver problems, but I have recently discovered that Dell does not provide support for Win 7, OR 64 bit operating systems in this model. I think I have all 32 bit Vista drivers.

I have attached the minidumps, and a .txt file of a new CPUZ report in case that would be informative. I hope you can tell me what the problem is, and how I can find the proper drivers.

Thanks.

mac173 · 26 Aug 2010

For some reason, the .txt file would not attach, here it is in zip.

**cluberti** · 26 Aug 2010

This looks like a driver tried to free a kernel pool address that had already been freed (double-free). The stack has the pool tag as "0", which is bogus, so there could be other problems here as well with whatever driver is doing this. You're going to need to enable special pool and pool tracking in Driver Verifier to catch this one.

Start > Run > verifier

Create custom settings
Select individual settings from a full list
Check "Special pool" and "Pool tracking"
Select driver names from a list
Sort by Provider, and select anything NOT listed as provided by Microsoft Corporation, and also do NOT select secdrv.sys and amdxdata.sys
Finish

Reboot, and hope the next crash dump points to the culprit.

mac173 · 26 Aug 2010

Ok, I created a restore point, and followed your instructions. I crashed after logging back into my desktop, while the HHD was still running loading all the background stuff. I have attached the new dump.

**cluberti** · 26 Aug 2010

Well, this one says win32k.sys is corrupt on your system:

Code:

0: kd> !chkimg -lo 50 -d !win32k
    fffff96000018000-fffff96000018003  4 bytes - win32k!EngCreatePalette+10
	[ 44 8b 94 24:00 00 00 00 ]
4 errors : !win32k (fffff96000018000-fffff96000018003)

// Not surprisingly, running that function caused the crash:
0: kd> .cxr 0xfffff88006b95d00
rax=fffff88006b96728 rbx=0000000000000000 rcx=0000000000000002
rdx=0000000000000000 rsi=0000000000000001 rdi=0000000000000000
rip=fffff96000018007 rsp=fffff88006b966d0 rbp=fffff88006b96ca0
 r8=0000000000000000  r9=0000000000ff0000 r10=fffff80002a18000
r11=fffff88006b966f8 r12=0000000000000000 r13=0000000000ff0000
r14=0000000000000000 r15=fffffa8004441051
iopl=0         nv up ei pl nz na po nc
cs=0010  ss=0018  ds=002b  es=002b  fs=0053  gs=002b             efl=00010206
win32k!EngCreatePalette+0x17:
fffff960`00018007 0033            add     byte ptr [rbx],dh ds:002b:00000000`00000000=??

0: kd> k
  *** Stack trace for last set context - .thread/.cxr resets it
Child-SP          RetAddr           Call Site
fffff880`06b966d0 00000000`00000000 win32k!EngCreatePalette+0x17

At this point, I'd suggest running sfc /scannow in the hopes it resolves it.

mac173 · 26 Aug 2010

I set the machine to run sfc, and left it at work to run. I will post the results when I get to work in the morning.

Thanks for the help.

richc46 · 26 Aug 2010

If SFC says no errors you are done.

If it shows that it corrected some errors but could not fix all. Run it again. It can only fix a few at a time.

mac173 · 27 Aug 2010

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

That did not find anything, any other ideas?

**cluberti** · 29 Aug 2010

Might be worth testing the RAM using memtest or the Dell utilities at this point - if sfc doesn't actually find corrupted binaries, that means they're likely being corrupted when being loaded in memory, and if driver verifier doesn't catch a driver doing it, that doesn't leave a whole host of possibilities other than bad hardware.

mac173 · 30 Aug 2010

Ok, I will reboot and run memtest now. It is a boot option, part of the boot loader from Ubuntu (I dual boot).

My real concern is that I have one or more of those bad Capacitors Dell shipped and then would not admit to. I have an extended warrenty, but what good does it do if Dell continually refuses to admit the hardware is bad? I will never buy a Dell product again.

BSOD on Dell Vostro 1500

BSOD on Dell Vostro 1500

CPUZ

Did that, and crashed.

Did it.

Nope

Ok