DriversCloud.com instructions for use

When the system crashes it generates a memory image of the crash on the hard disk, before returning a blue screen of death (BSOD) to the screen. These minidumps can be analyzed by this service to help find the cause of the crash. 85% of crashes are caused by buggy drivers. The rest is almost completely due to hardware.

For the service to work you need to enable minidump generation on the system. Click on the advanced system settings. Click on settings in startup and recovery. In the pop-up menu choose partial memory image. Click on OK.

Your system is now properly configured. You must now wait for the next BSOD because no minidump was generated if your preferences were incorrect.

Once a new BSOD appears , start the detection and then click on the BSOD Analysis button in the service bar.

The agent is configured by default to scan the 8 most recent minidumps. You can switch from one BSOD to another by clicking on the small arrow pointing down to the right in the configuration page.

The first information gives the type of BSOD (Bug Check String) and the date of the bsod.

If the dump analysis is a success a Source of crash section appears. It indicates the driver where the crash occurred. In the example above it is the graphical kernel of Windows that crashes. We can deduce that it is a problem related to the graphics card. Either the graphics driver or the graphics card itself. We advise you to search on Google with the name of the driver if it is not explicit enough.

In some cases you also get a call stack. It allows you to see the path of the different drivers called before causing the BSOD. If the source of the crash is not clear, the analysis of this call stack can give some indication.

If the analysis fails you will come across ntoskrnl.exe. This is the kernel of the system, it does not mean that the problem comes from the kernel itself. On current systems the drivers and the kernel share the same memory space, a driver can alter the state of the kernel and make it crash.

In the case of BSOD 124 (WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR ), recent systems return hardware errors through the WHEA technology. In the example above we can clearly see that the processor is involved. Indeed the problem on this example was caused by an unstable overclocking.

If the analysis doesn't give anything you have to perform a series of classical tests for the hardware:

• The memory with the memtest software.
• The processor with the OCCTsoftware
• You can monitor temperatures and voltages with the DriversCloudhardware monitoring service
• Voltage drops with OCCT software
• GPU benchmark with OCCT
• sMART information on the DriversCloudhard disk page
• The hard disk errors indicated in theevent viewer.

Finally you can post your BSOD problem on the forum in the dedicated section to get help.