Debugging Windows 8 Install BSOD

In my last post I described how to prevent Windows from automatically restarting when encountering a BSOD during the OS install process. This allowed me to see the  ACPI_BIOS_ERROR fault code while installing Windows 8 on my new SuperMicro workstation. The new Windows 8 BSOD page looks friendly, but no longer displays any error parameters other than the main fault code.

In order to get additional details of the crash, I had to hook up a kernel debugger to the machine. Windows 8 adds USB3 and TCPIP kernel debug support, and I will describe how I used the TCPIP network option to capture details of the crash.

First thing to do is prepare our tools, download the Windows 8 Debugging Tools for Windows package, and the Windows 8 Symbols.

Unfortunately the debugging tools are no longer available as a standalone download, and you need to install the SDK or WDK on a Windows 8 system in order to get them, but you can choose to only install the debugging tools. Once you installed the debugging tools on one machine, you can copy the MSI installers or the directory to any other machines, including Windows 7 systems. You will find the tools in the “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Debuggers” folder.

Microsoft is pretty good at publishing symbols for most released versions of their products to their public symbol server, but I prefer to extract the symbols to a working directory on my machine, or to upload the symbols to our internal symbol server. You can install the downloaded symbols MSI package directly, or use the following command to extract the symbols from the MSI file to a location on disk. Run an elevated (right click run as administrator) command prompt, and type:

msiexec /a [symbol msi file name] /qb targetdir="[output directory]"

Next we need to enable kernel network debugging in the BCD options. This needs to be done on a Windows 8 machine as the network debugging command is not supported in older versions of BCDEdit. I should also call out that network debugging support is required for hardware logo certification, but not all current adapters support it. Insert the bootable Windows 8 USB key, run an elevated command prompt, and type:

bcdedit –store [usb key drive]:\boot\bcd /dbgsettings net hostip:[IP of WinDbg machine] port:50000

BCDEdit will output the connection security key that is required by WinDbg.

Start WinDbg, and enable network kernel debugging, entering the port number and security key.

Boot the target machine, you will see the target machine connecting to WinDbg:

Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 6.2.8400.0 AMD64
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Using NET for debugging
Opened WinSock 2.0
Waiting to reconnect...
Connected to target 192.168.1.106 on port 50000 on local IP 192.168.1.100.
Connected to Windows 8 8400 x64 target at (Fri Jul 20 11:07:21.583 2012 (UTC - 7:00)), ptr64 TRUE
Kernel Debugger connection established.

And then the ACPI_BIOS_ERROR crash:

25: kd> !analyze -v
*******************************************************************************
*                                                                             *
*                        Bugcheck Analysis                                    *
*                                                                             *
*******************************************************************************

Followup: MachineOwner


Even with all the crash details, it still doesn’t really help me make progress, as it has been two days since I logged the support request with SuperMicro, and no response yet.