Interpreting Windows Stop Screens

When a Windows "Blue Screen" condition occurs, users can add RTX information to the Windows information in the minidump file. This additional information can prove helpful when trying to determine the cause of the Blue Screen condition.

To add RTX information to the Windows dump file:

Verify that the system disk drive has a paging file size of 2mb or greater.
1. Click Start > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > System.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and, in the Performance section of the window, click Settings.
3. In the Performance Options window, click the Advanced tab.
4. In the Virtual Memory section of the window, verify that the size of the paging file is at least 2 mb. If necessary, click Change to adjust the size of the paging file.
Verify that the Windows Startup and Recovery options are configured for the default value, Small memory dump (64KB). See the Windows documentation or Help for instructions that are appropriate for the operating system that you are using.
In the RTX Properties window, on the Debug tab, in the lower section of the window, enable the Minimal Information radio button.

When a Blue Screen condition occurs, the dump file type that is created includes the following information:

The stop message and parameters, as well as other data
A list of loaded drivers

The processor context (PRCB) for the processor that stopped
The process information and kernel context (EPROCESS) for the process that stopped
The process information and kernel context (ETHREAD) for the thread that stopped
The Kernel-mode call stack for the thread that stopped

This kind of dump file can be useful when space is limited. However, because of the limited amount of information included, errors that were not directly caused by the thread running at the time of the problem may not be discovered by an analysis of this file.