Corrupt minidumps

[patfla]

Hi,

2-3 wks ago had to send my 1-yr-old T43 to the depot for the first time. And it came back with a new motherboard (called 'planar card' in IBM's repair incident documentation).

The mch is working again - more-or-less. I've had 8 BSODs and 8 minidumps between 11/7 and 11/14.

As part of investigating this myself (I'm a programmer), I discovered the minidumps (c:\windows\minidump\), as well as dumpchk.exe from the 'XP Support Tools'.

After at first being confused, I've read around on the web, and found that the following:

c:\windows\minidump>dumpchk mini111406-01.dmp
dumpchk mni111406-01.tmp
Loading dump file mini111406-01.dmp
**** DebugClient cannot open DumpFile - error 80070002

means that the minidump is corrupt and of no use.

Moreover, I've found 1 out of the 8 that's OK and I know now what correct (and interesting and useful) output from dumpchk looks like.

So how to get good dumps (heh)?

When it does BSOD, there's some message at the bottom of the bluescreen that says something like "writing to dump file". Except that there's never a message saying "finished writing to dump file".

The files are only 94,208 bytes so it can't take very long to write them out.

And still 7 out of 8 are corrupt and unusable.

Hope someone has some minidump wisdom to impart.

[patfla]

I'd searched before (the net) and hadn't found anything (about corrupt) minidumps.

Searched again now and found the following:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic48369.html

faulty ram/psu

well that's interesting because I ran several iterations of MemTest86 last night and came up with nothing.

pat

[jdhurst]

I cannot offer anything on dumpchk, but I can offer this:

On a properly working T23, T30, T41, T42, and T43 certified and equipped with XP Pro, they none of them will BSOD. I know what a BSOD is, and I know that these machines will run reliably without doing that.

So, something wrong with the machine (still), something wrong with the build, or something went wrong between the build you had and the motherboard you got.

I would either return the machine and say (truthfully) it is totally broken (for it is), or gamble, back up your data, and reimage it to see if you can properly install it and make it run reliably.

FWIW, dumpchk.exe is not on my machines.

Good luck, ... John Hurst

[patfla]

Hi John,

dumpchk.exe is part of 'XP Support Tools' which can be downloaded from MS.

pat