Windbg

I finally figured out why I kept on getting VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s when installing Windows 8 on my SuperMicro workstations. It turns out that the problem goes away when I use a PCIe slot associated with CPU #1, instead of a slot associated with CPU #2. Some history on my adventures with Windows 8 and SuperMicro SuperWorkstations: I got ACPI_BIOS_ERROR BSOD’s while installing Windows 8, SuperMicro provided a Beta BIOS that resolved the problem. The Windows 8 install hangs if installing to an SSD drive on an LSI 2308 SAS controller, that issue is still unresolved, but can be worked around by connecting the SSD to the Intel SATA controller. I got VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE BSOD’s while installing Windows 8 with an NVidia Quadro 5000 graphics card, same with an ATI FirePro V7900 or an NVidia GeForce GTX 680 or an ATI HD 7970. And this post is about resolving that problem. ...

This post is about Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows, symbol servers, and symbol proxy servers. You can read my posts about this problem on the Microsoft WinDbg group, and on the Google Chromium group. We run several symbol servers, and a single symbol proxy server that provides transparent access to all our symbol servers, as well as the Microsoft symbol servers. I was debugging a Google Chrome crash, and was looking for symbols for Chrome. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that both Mozilla and Google have public debug symbol servers for Firefox and for Chrome. I added the Mozilla and Google symbol servers to our symbol proxy server list. ...