Debugging windows - what a hardware boo boo looks like

12.00.00am BST (GMT +0100) Mon 7th Apr 2008

Link below steps through debugging of a blue screen of death in windows. I don't follow a lot of it because I'm not a 'C' hacker. But, simplistically, the system is looking to run a program that's in memory. The address in memory that the program starts is given a name, technically comprising a 'pointer'.

The system read the address from the pointer, and crashed choking on what it found at that address.

However, the address in the pointer and the address from which it was reading were not the same. The CPU had decided to read from the wrong address, and was sucking in a bunch of user data from another area of memory.

The diagnosis concludes that the CPU was overheating.

The thought process in the the diagnosis is useful. The investigation starts off by concluding that scanning photos with that particular hardware used to work fine, and so its unlikely to be a problem with the driver. This is a useful lesson - one could other wise spend a lot of time trying to fix something which isn't broken, or worse still break something else.

Related Link:

NT Debugging blog - Debugging a bluescreen at home