1
The last few weeks I began having occasional incidents of blue screen of death (BSOD). Here is a photograph of the one that occurred on June 12, 2013:
As you can see, it says it's "Initializing disk for crash dump" - but unfortunately, it never actually writes the dump file.
Here are the contents of the C:\Windows\Minidump directory:
and the last dump is from over a year ago.
I have set it to dump, thus:
I would like to know how I can get Windows to return to actually creating the dump files. Obviously, I'd also like to stop the BSODs from occurring, but without the dump files it's much harder to find the root cause. At any rate, I am not looking in this question for how to resolve this particular example of a BSOD - I want to know how to get Windows to create the dump files when a BSOD happens. Why does it seem to hang instead of actually completing to write the dump file?
EDIT 2013-06-23 - Pagefile info:
yosh m
Posted 2013-06-19T10:10:46.843
Reputation: 2 048
1When a system is unable to generate a crash dump the storage device is likely to blame. If your storage device is starting to fail, then you won't be able to generate a crash dump, because the storage device cannot be even written to by Windows once the crash happens. – Ramhound – 2013-06-19T12:06:06.810
@ramhound - thanks for the suggestion. FYI I've had this problem over a year and the disk displays no other signs of impending failure - and it passes diagnostic tests. Any other ideas? – yosh m – 2013-06-20T06:01:59.450
@magicandre1981 - since it doesn't get created I can't really know. But i assume it would be about 300k like the ones in the directory from a year or two ago. (see above) – yosh m – 2013-06-20T06:38:07.733
I would just duplicate the data on the disk and replace it. Huge HDDs are dirt cheap. Other hardware failure could be to blame including the memory so run memtestx86 and report back. I would also reinstall your display drivers. – Ramhound – 2013-06-20T11:22:15.847
ups, I mean Pagefile size. How large is the pagefile? – magicandre1981 – 2013-06-21T04:41:14.103
@magicandre1981 - Pagefile size is currently at 3892mb (see screenshot I added to the question) – yosh m – 2013-06-23T06:49:27.727
@Ramhound - memtest showed no problems. I could replace the HDD, but I haven't see any indication that it is the source of the problem. Tonight I will try to run a deep spinrite test overnight to verify the disk is fully vetted.
– yosh m – 2013-06-23T08:38:35.227@Ramhound - Spinrite needs 50 hours to fully vet the drive. I've been giving it about 6-8 hours a night, so it'll take a few more days to ensure the drive is really fully OK. Meanwhile, everything has been fine. Meanwhile, if you or anyone has other ideas as to why Windows isn't creating the requested dump files, I'd like to hear... Thx. – yosh m – 2013-06-26T08:31:00.270