DRIVER_STATE_POWER_FAILURE 0x9F, no crash dump written. Typical?

Some background first:

I have a Windows 7 SP1 x64 computer. My pagefile is disabled. I enabled DedicatedDumpFile and DumpFile locations on a different hard drive (because the C drive that holds windows is an SSD drive with limited space). I also enabled the user generated crash option to test this setup:

Code:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\kbdhid\Parameters]
"CrashOnCtrlScroll"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\i8042prt\Parameters]
"CrashOnCtrlScroll"=dword:00000001

After rebooting the test succeeded and I was able to manually cause a kernel dump (CrashDumpEnabled = 0x2) to be written to disk by holding down the right CTRL key while hitting Scroll Lock twice.


Now I did all of this to catch DRIVER_STATE_POWER_FAILURE on hibernate. It's extremely rare on my system but when it has happened there was no record left of it happening in event viewer or seemingly anywhere because I assume crash dumps were disabled (windows does this automatically when there is no pagefile). Now that the crash dumps are explicitly enabled I had another DRIVER_STATE_POWER_FAILURE today but again nothing was written. I suspect my VMWare Workstation 7 drivers, only because every time it's happened I've had some virtual machine running. That may be a coincidence though.

So is it typical for DRIVER_STATE_POWER_FAILURE to have no dump file? I'm wondering if since the computer was in the process of hibernating maybe it already shut power to the SATA drive that I write the crash dumps to, and that's why the dump couldn't be written. Or maybe that makes no sense. I really don't know.

I welcome any insight anyone has on this issue. Thanks

Northernsoul55 said:

Hi,
Have you reconfigured windows to collect the correct info?
You want small memory dumps - "MiniDumps"

Yeah I appreciate what you are saying but a minidump wasn't collected either. I got both when I tested the crash dump with a manual dump but when I actually had a BSOD that I didn't initiate there was no kernel dump or minidump file.

I'm sure you will need to have a Page File set for the crash information to be saved

Northernsoul55 said:

See if you are able to run Driver Verifier and it should hopefully throw up a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and enable us to find the culprit

Unfortunately I cannot run driver verifier without disabling my Sandboxie driver. Even if I choose not to monitor the sandboxie driver it won't load properly when driver verifier is enabled. I have a similar problem with VMWare's vmx86.sys and locked pages. I'm sure there's a way around that one but I can't find a way around the sandboxie one. Therefore I just can't at the current time use driver verifier. I'd like to but this problem happens so rarely I just can't.

x BlueRobot said:

I'm sure you will need to have a Page File set for the crash information to be saved

I have read this as well. Some places I read suggest creating the custom location to force a dump file. It appears that does work, at least on Windows 7. Or maybe it doesn't work all the time and that's why I don't have a crash dump from the last time I crashed.


Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I'm just gonna wait until the next time it happens and take a photograph of the screen, and maybe if I'll get lucky a dumpfile will be written.

To be continued...

What partition have you set up the page file on?

x BlueRobot said:

What partition have you set up the page file on?

There is no page file. I have 16GB of RAM and an SSD drive with limited space. I could put a pagefile on my data drive but I don't need it.

You will need a page file, in order for a crash dump file to be saved.

x BlueRobot said:

You will need a page file, in order for a crash dump file to be saved.

Yeah I know what you are saying but to expand on what I said above I've read that you can create a custom dump file location in order to workaround that. I did create a custom dump file location and then the warnings in event viewer from volmgr that 'crash dump initialization failed' disappeared, and when I tested I was able to create crash dumps. However like I was saying initially with this DRIVER_STATE_POWER_FAILURE I get no crash dump.