Useful debugging information
To assist us in debugging driver problems, it will be most helpful if you can supply a full description of the events that lead up the problem occurring. We also need information about the PC platform you are running and the device hardware.
Windows Operating Systems
Kernel Debug Information
If your system stops with the notorious "Blue Screen Of Death" (usually abbreviated to "BSOD") or just reboots without any warning when you are using the device, then in Windows NT operating systems Microsoft have provided a very useful facility for assisting us to debug this catastrophic problem. You need to enable this facility before we can get any information from it.
Go to the "Control Panel", double click on "System", then select the "Advanced" tab and click on the "Startup and Recovery Options" "Settings" button. You will then be presented with a dialogue box like the one shown.
The default setup for Windows XP is for a "Small Memory Dump" to be produced and to automatically reboot when a stop occurs. This minidump file is not very useful to us since it only snapshots some error codes. More useful is the "Kernel Memory Dump" which provides a system snapshot of kernel memory, so select this option. You can deselect or select the "Automatically restart" option as your preference.
The dump file is produced when the system next BSODs. The file will be located in your Windows operating system folder (usually "c:\windows\memory.dmp"). This is usually a very large file (usually somewhere between 50Mbytes to 100Mbytes in size) so please contact us before sending it via email and we'll instruct you on how to upload it to our ftp server.
DebugView
DebugView is a freeware program that displays the kernel debug messages. This can be useful for assisting us with not so catastrophic problems. You can download DebugView from the Sysinternals website.
You may need to have a special version of the driver from us or the debug messages may need to be enabled via a registry switch, so contact us for instructions.
If you deselect the "Force Carriage Returns" option it makes the information that is logged a little bit more readable.
A log file of messages from the driver may be saved to disk, and this file may be sent to us for further investigation.
Microsoft System Information
The System Information program provided with Windows 2000 & XP operating systems provides a way for you to easily tell us about your PC. All you need to do is send us the system information (nfo) file. This file is very useful for us to identify the installed system components and other software that may be affecting the performance of our drivers. Generate the "nfo" by running the msinfo32.exe application. Just click on the "Start" button and select "Run..." and type "msinfo32.exe" into the dialogue box.
Select "File" and "Save..." give it a file name ending in .nfo and click OK, then send us the file for analysis.
If the problematic hardware is present when the msinfo32.exe application is run, this program will also give us information about all the hardware resources in use by the system and any startup problems with the driver.
PCI Diagnostics
The Pseries diagnostics program can also give us detailed information about the PCI bus of your PC in the default BIOS configured state (before Windows loads). This is useful for debugging some resource allocation issues.
Linux Operating Systems
In the Linux operating system, gathering debugging
information is relatively simple. Most information is logged in the
dmesg or under \var\log\%messagefile%. You may need to look in
various places related to the problem you are having.
The most useful diagnostic tools are:
- dmesg
- lsmod
- lspci
Use the dmesg command in a terminal window to display any messages logged by modules etc.
Use the lsmod command in a terminal window to check the module is loading.
You can list pci devices and resources using the lspci command in a terminal window.
We'll probably need all of the above information to help you to solve your problem.
