How to troubleshoot partial lockups?

[Tripredacus]

My computer has been locking up lately. It does maybe once a week or so and so far has only happened 3 times. How can I go about troubleshooting this? Here are the facts:

- Windows 7 Professional x86

- Currently not using ReadyBoost

- Mouse arrow still moves around

- Start menu/Taskbar does not work, hover or click.

- Always locks up with Firefox (PaleMoon) open

- Keyboard does not work, ie: NumLock does not work

- Windows itself isn't frozen

- No event logs prior to lockup within say 10 minutes

I have not installed SP1 yet. The interesting thing is that it always happens when using PaleMoon, but has happened while using 3 different websites so far. As noted, Windows itself isn't frozen, as hitting the power button will initiate a normal Shutdown. Also, event viewer does note the time of the manual power off or reset. I already went through my plugins. I have the Java SDK disabled and everything is up to date. PaleMoon is also fully updated.

There are things I can think to do, but maybe someone else has a suggestion?

- Use ReadyBoost again

- Install SP1

- disable the JRE plugin.

[MagicAndre1981]

create a full dump when you get the issue, zip and and share the dump to cluberti.

[Tripredacus]

Ok I will try doing that, however how can I cause the system to bugcheck if the keyboard input does not work? Maybe burn a CD that autoruns something?

[MagicAndre1981]

If you use a USB keyboard change the settings to this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969028

[cluberti]

Better to use a PS/2 keyboard though - the USB bus is a polling bus, so if you lock at a very high IRQL, the bugcheck won't occur (hence why there's a hotfix, but the instructions still suggest a PS/2 keyboard). PS/2 is an interrupt bus, and would fire no matter what IRQL the machine is at.

Do yourself a favor and get a PS/2 keyboard on there, even temporarily, and set CrashOnCtrlScroll as per the dump instructions - reboot, and get that dump.

[Tripredacus]

Oh I wish I could.... My motherboard is the Intel DQ35JO, no legacy I/O ports. I will try to build a CD at work tomorrow that will initiate a bugcheck.

[cluberti]

You could use notmyfault as well, if you can get it to run and be available before you lock up. However, given what you've mentioned with numlock and clicking, you're locked up way above dispatch level. An NMI might be the only thing you've got if you can initiate an NMI dump from that motherboard.

[Tripredacus]

I'm still having this problem, so I took my PC into work to have time to look at it and found nothing wrong. There is no pattern to the lockups, but there is a pattern of behaviour prior to and during the lockup.

1. This always happens when running a Mozilla browser on websites both with and without Flash content. Browsers it has done it with: Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4, Pale Moon 3.6, Pale Moon 4.

2. When the computer "locks up" it is actually running. If I wait a couple minutes from doing a hard reset or shutdown, EventLog will log the correct time of shutdown, not the time of supposed lockup.

3. The keyboard stops working first, even if I am not using the keyboard. The mouse cursor will still move around but will eventually stop.

4. The HDD activity light will be active (not solid, not off) during the time of lockup. (NOTE: I haven't waited to see if it unfreezes)

5. By checking event logs, there is a pattern in the SYSTEM log that appears EVERY TIME this happens. Here is an example.

EventLog (from after reboot): The previous system shutdown at 9:36:47 PM on 4/5/2011 was unexpected

4/5/2011@9:36:23 Windows Error Reporting Service entered the running state

4/5/2011@9:36:00 Multimedia Class Scheduler service entered the running state

Now every lockup I have experience show the WER and MCS services starting less than a minute before the reported shutdown time. Of the 7 times my system has locked up, this has been constant each time. Not sure what that means.

[MagicAndre1981]

post the hardware specs and try to generate the dump.

[Tripredacus]

My best bet right now is next time it locks up (since WER does open) to not touch anything and see if it does something instead of just resetting the system. Here are my specs:

OS: Windows 7 Professional x86

MB: Intel DQ35JO

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5GHz

RAM: 4GB DDR2 800

Video (onboard disabled) : nVidia GeForce N220GT 1GB

Sound (onboard disabled) : Creative SoundBlaster Audigy Gamer PCI

OS HDD: 80GB WD SATA

PSU: 460w

[MagicAndre1981]

check this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028504

maybe it gives you some helpful information

[cluberti]

If you can ping it and/or run psexec remotely on it when it's hung, you could use that to call notmyfault or crash.exe from the remote psexec prompt.

[Tripredacus]

I had previously installed SP1 (which seemed to have removed my environment variable for the RTM symbols) and hadn't had a problem in awhile. I had followed some good advice to set it up to enable USB keyboard to generate a manual crash dump. So I had locked up about 20 minutes ago, and generated this great 3.5GB MEMORY.DMP file. I tried to compress with 7zip Ultra (as noted elsewhere) but 7zip kindly informed me that it could not allocate enough memory to complete the compress operation.... Then my PC locked up again while trying to find this thread again.... I will see what I can do to upload this file. Worst case scenario I can burn it to a DVD and take it to work to compress and upload.

But even so, is it even worth it until I can get the SP1 symbols installed?

[MagicAndre1981]

the Sp1 symbols are on the symbol server. You don't need the offline installer.:

srv*C:\Windows\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols;

the 7-Zip tool tells you how much RAM is needed to compress the file. Select a dictionary with 32MB. This uses 1GB to compress the data. So 1GB is left in the address space of 7-zip.

[Tripredacus]

I was able to compress using your suggestion, however it would appear that mediafire does not work on any of the browsers I have at home. It outright didn't work in Chrome or Firefox, and in IE it at least started the upload, however its been sitting at 0% for over 12 hours. I will bring the SP1 symbols home, install those and wait until the next time to try it again. Maybe by then I can figure out a way to upload those to mediafire.