Bluescreening without an error trail..?

Question

My PC occasionally blue-screens (about once/wk). The error is displayed very quickly (too fast for me to catch), so I look for DUMP files.

After blue screening today, I checked my whole system for files that end with a *.DMP extension. The only one created today was this one:

C:\WinNT\MEMORY.DMP

...and this file had a zero byte length (was empty.)

How can I identify what the problem is in hopes of being able to resolve it? Is there some othe place to look for log info? Whe n I checked my system event log, I see the following error which happened around the time of the blue screen, but I am thinking that this is a non fatal error:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Launch permission for the COM Server application with CLSID 
{24FF4FDC-1D9F-4195-8C79-0DA39248FF48}
 to the user NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM SID (S-1-5-18).  This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Suggestions on where to go from here? I'm on SP2.

Answer 1

1. Right-Click My Computer and choose Properties.

2. Go to the Advanced tab and click the Settings button under Startup and Recovery.

3. Under the Write debugging information section, select one of the dump file options, from the dropdown box. "small memory dump" is all you need 99% of the time.

4. Make sure they are being saved to %systemroot%\Minidump.

5. Pagefile has to be enabled for a dump to be written to the disk, if it is not enabled, then the other settings will not generate a dump and write it to the disk.

This sets your system to generate a minidump file every time it BSODS to C:\Windows\Minidump (assuming C:\Windows is where your Windows XP is installed.

I suggest you create the %systemroot%\minidump folder if it is not already present.

Reboot to take effect.

Answer 2

Your system is rebooting automatically upon failure. To change this behaviour so that you can see the blue screen error (the system will then wait indefinitely for you to reboot it manually), follow these steps:

1. Right-click on "My computer"
2. Select "Properties"
3. Activate the "Advanced" tab
4. Click on the "Settings" button immediately below the "Startup and Recovery" heading
5. Disable the "Automatically restart" checkbox below the "System failure" heading

Since it's unclear whether a reboot is required to make this setting take effect, you may wish reboot after changing this setting to be sure that it takes effect.