I am occasionally seeing hard lockups on XP: totally unresponsive to keyboard/mouse, screen freezes at time of crash, no SSH/VNC possible. Very intermittent, nothing in the logs. I never see a blue screen on any kind of error message. I would like to know what I can do to go about debugging this, since:
- I occasionally see similar problems on other machines that I am responsible for. Better and more systematic crash debugging techniques will be very useful.
- Sometimes happens several times per week - or even day - on my own machine.
This morning I logged in via VNC, logged out again, 20 minutes later physically sat at PC and it crashed around the time of VNC logout.
I tend to suspect video cards in these kind of situations but it's a modern-ish card with modern drivers (one revision back, but this has been happening for 5 revisions or more) and normally would at least see a blue screen I expect.
What would you suspect? Where can I look or what can I set up for more information? Bear in mind that this happens about once every 3 or 4 weeks, so extensive logging or intrusive monitoring isn't really an option.
UPDATE
Memory has been tested with memtest86+.
There are minidumps, but not many and they don't correspond to freezes (they are all 1 year old). Basic analysis gives code THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER_M in ati2cqag.dll. I think these are probably not related.
I tried disabling VNC Mirror driver for several weeks and still get plenty of crashes.
I've now seen it happen "live" quite a few times. I am moving the mouse, browsing etc. and the whole thing freezes.
UPDATE 2
Having not seen any crashes for weeks, I got pretty much a crash per day for a week. Yesterday I saw it crash as soon as soon after the bootloader, then at the Windows login screen, then on third attempt when syncing iPhone. Again: all the hardware has been replaced since this started.
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