Blue Screen of Death on a dual-boot PC

[krabapple]

I have an HP laptop n, about four years old, that has XP and Ubuntu Linux on it. For the past few months I've been
getting lots of BSODs while on the XP side. Most of the time I'm able to reboot into XP, other times I have to go through a boot
cycle on the Linux side to be able to reboot into the XP side.

Anyway, I notice I never get BSOD or crashes while on the Linux side, and I'm ignorant enough not to know if this is because 1) there is no such thing as a Linux BSOD equivalent, so I wouldn't know if my computer is fucked, while on the Linux side or 2) my laptop is fundamentally sound, but there's just some driver issue on the XP side that I need to resolve.

Btw, the BSOD message is *always* 'IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL'.

[Rspaight]

Anyway, I notice I never get BSOD or crashes while on the Linux side, and I'm ignorant enough not to know if this is because 1) there is no such thing as a Linux BSOD equivalent, so I wouldn't know if my computer is fucked, while on the Linux side or 2) my laptop is fundamentally sound, but there's just some driver issue on the XP side that I need to resolve.

Almost certainly the latter, I'd think. You'd get kernel panics in Linux if you were having equivalent hardware problems there. It sounds like a particularly nasty driver conflict to me.

[krabapple]

Thanks. Are there any online step-by step guides for diagnosing a driver-related BSOD? I'd rather do this rationally than by trial and error.

[Rspaight]

Don't know of any off hand, but I'm sure some Googling would bear fruit (perhaps even on the error itself). I've been on Macs for a while, so I'm rusty with XP troubleshooting.

Generally two approaches work for me: (a) nuking the whole thing and starting over, or (b) isolating the culprit by disabling devices until the problem goes away. Unfortunately, your problem sounds like it might be a conflict between two drivers, which is devilishly hard to isolate. So heavy artillery may be the quickest approach, if you can pull your data off.

[krabapple]

Well, thatnks to some Googling, I was able to employ the Windows Debugger to read my memory dump files. From that I found that the misbehaving driver was likely to be for my laptop's Intel wireless networking device; downloading and installing an updated driver *seems* to have done the trick...we shall see.

[krabapple]

Well, thatnks to some Googling, I was able to employ the Windows Debugger to read my memory dump files. From that I found that the misbehaving driver was likely to be for my laptop's Intel wireless networking device; downloading and installing an updated driver *seems* to have done the trick...we shall see.

One week later and still no crashes. Yay me.