Using the Windows Driver Verifier. Common driver errors and solutions How to check if drivers are damaged

Indicates a system driver that is unlikely to be causing the problem (for example, win32k.sys). In this case, a serious analysis of the dump will be required, requiring very deep knowledge and experience in this area. However, you can check your drivers yourself using the operating system's built-in driver checker. Verifier.exe. Although it is covered in detail in the Microsoft knowledge base article Using the Driver Verifier to troubleshoot Windows driver problems, the material presented there is presented at a fairly advanced technical level. Below is a brief description of the steps you need to follow to check your drivers.

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Getting started with the Driver Verifier

On the menu Start — Execute(or Start — Search) enter verifier and press Enter. The Driver Checker will launch. Select an item Create non-standard parameters (for program code) and press the button Next.

Select individual parameters from a complete list and press the button Next.

In the next step, check all the boxes except Simulating resource shortages and press the button Next.

In the next step, select Automatically select unsigned drivers and press the button Next. If no unsigned drivers are found, go to .

Unsigned drivers

If unsigned drivers are detected, you will see a list of them.

Drivers can belong to both devices and applications. Do not close the Driver Verifier window or click the Next Now.

Search for updated drivers

You need to check if there are updated drivers.

1. If you see an application driver listed, visit the manufacturer's website to see if the application has been updated. If there is no updated version, you can try uninstalling the app (you can always reinstall it later). If critical errors stop, that was the cause.
2. If you see a device driver in the list and are running Windows Vista, use Windows Update to search for new drivers. This method works well for Windows Vista because many device manufacturers work with Microsoft to make their drivers available for download through Windows Update. In Control Panel, select Windows Update and check for updates to your device driver. If the driver is found, install it.
3. If Windows Update doesn't offer you new drivers, visit the device manufacturer's website. Perhaps new drivers are available there. If you are having problems finding drivers, please visit the Find Drivers, Firmware and Manuals forum on OSzone.net.

After updating an application or driver, close the Driver Verifier window. pressing a button Cancel(not Next) . Restart your computer and continue using the operating system. If the critical error no longer occurs, you have resolved it by updating the driver.

Removing drivers

If new drivers cannot be found, try uninstalling the driver.

Attention! Removing drivers leads to device inoperability. After a reboot, in the best case, the operating system will install the appropriate driver from its own driver store. If you are not sure whether to remove a particular driver, do not remove it.

In Device Manager ( Start — Search / Run — devmgmt.msc — OK) find the device, right-click on it and select from the context menu Properties. Then go to the tab Driver and press the button Delete.

Checking for unsigned drivers

Attention! After checking unsigned drivers, the system may not boot (described below is how to act in such a situation).

If you do not want to remove the driver and/or want to check for unsigned drivers, in the Driver Verifier window, click Next. You will be prompted to select a physical disk.

Ready, then restart your computer. If after rebooting you see a blue screen with an error, the problematic driver has been identified and its name will be included in the error message. Enter Safe Mode and reset all driver verification options by entering Start — Search / Run team verifier.exe /reset.

If the system boots in normal mode, the check for unsigned drivers completed successfully - they are not the source of the problem. You can see a list of tested drivers by running verifier.exe .

Since unsigned drivers are not the cause of a fatal error, you need to check other drivers.

Custom driver check

If no unsigned drivers are found or checking them does not reveal any problems, you will have to perform a custom driver check. In this case, in the window shown below, select Select driver name from the list.

In the next step, you will be asked to select drivers to scan. Don't select all drivers at once, since checking them will take a lot of time and system resources.

Therefore, the verification may have to be carried out in several stages. The step-by-step sequence for selecting drivers could be as follows:

1. Recently updated drivers or those that typically cause problems (antivirus drivers, firewall drivers, virtual disks).
2. Drivers not supplied by Microsoft.
3. Group of 10 - 15 drivers at a time.

Select the drive on which the operating system is installed and click Ready, then restart your computer.

Attention! After checking the drivers, the system may not boot (described below is how to act in such a situation).

If after rebooting you see a blue screen with an error, the problematic driver has been identified and its name will be included in the error message. Restart your computer and enter safe mode by clicking F8 when loading. After logging in, reset all driver verification settings by entering Start — Search / Run team verifier.exe /reset.

If the system boots in normal mode, the check of the selected drivers was completed successfully - they are not the source of the problem. You can see a list of tested drivers by running verifier.exe and selecting the item in the first step Display information about currently verified drivers.

Now select the next driver group and check again.

All drivers have been checked - what next?

If the check of all drivers was successful, I have to take my hat off to your patience and perseverance. Most likely, drivers are not the cause of the critical error occurring on your system. It is possible that the problem lies in the hardware of your computer - for example, a faulty hard drive or RAM, or the power supply is not powerful enough to power all devices. There may be other hardware problems that also cannot be identified by checking the drivers.

A driver is a program that is necessary for the operating system and various software applications to interact with hardware devices connected to it. Hardware components such as sound, video cards, printers, scanners and they all need a compatible driver for them to work properly.

All device drivers are designed for specific operating systems. For example, Windows XP drivers will be different from Windows Vista drivers. Therefore, it is necessary to take extra precautions when installing and updating device drivers because installing incorrect or incompatible drivers may not only damage the device but also your system.

Common Causes of Driver Errors

Some common causes of driver errors are listed below:

• You are trying to use a hardware device that is not properly connected to your computer.
• Two or more drivers on the system are incompatible with each other.
• The driver or drivers are installed that are not compatible with your system.
• There are unnecessary or outdated drivers on your PC.

Steps to fix driver errors
The first step in identifying a driver error is to ensure that the device is properly connected to your system. Many devices give connection errors, so check that your device is connected to your system correctly. Next, you need to make sure that there are no problems with the drivers. You can do this using the Device Manager utility that comes with your Windows computer system. You can open Device Manager by directly running devmgmt. msc from the command lineStart>Doneit. When you open Device Manager, you will see a list of all the devices connected to your system. You can easily identify a defective file because it will be marked with a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark inside. Right-click on a device to open its properties dialog box. In the properties dialog, check the section Device status on the tab General. Drivers are displayed on the Drivers tab of the properties window. Here, complete one of the following tasks:

• Check and Install Driver Updates: Outdated drivers are one of the main causes of driver errors. To solve this problem, click the button Update Driver.The Hardware Update Wizard will open. You can use the wizard to update the driver. It is recommended that you first download the driver update and save it to a convenient location on your hard drive and then start the update process because the update wizard will ask you to specify a location to install the update.

• Driver rollback: If you start receiving an error message shortly after installing a new update, then it is likely that the new update is buggy. To fix this problem, click the button Driver rollback to revert to your previous driver version.

• Uninstalling the driver: If there are problems with your current drivers - missing or corrupted files - then the best thing you can do is click Delete to uninstall the current driver, and then reinstall the driver again.

In case you are not sure what you are doing and if you find the above fixes a little difficult, then it is recommended that you choose a reliable driver scanning tool. Driver scanning tools are designed to check all device drivers and make sure they are not up-to-date. Whenever new updates are available, the driver scanner automatically downloads and installs the best updates on your computer.

For such cases, to check how correctly the drivers work in Windows XP, there is a special utility verifier.exe. Utility Driver Verifier, creates the most severe conditions for drivers, in which the probability of failure is very high, and the name of the failing driver is determined with the highest accuracy. Therefore, in case of non-systematic failures, it is useful to run the utility Driver Verifier.exe. There is no need to download Verifier, since the utility is included in Windows and is located in the directory Windows\system32

1 Working with Verifier.exe

1.1. Let's launch Verifier.exe.Start - Run - Verifier.exe:

1.3. Utility Driver Verifier.exe will ask to reboot:

1.4. Two new parameters will appear in the registry:

-- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\VerifyDriverLevel

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\VerifyDrivers

Registry settings related to Driver Verifier.exe

2 Test results

2.1. If in the first window of the utility Driver Verifier.exe choose "Display information about currently tested drivers", then a window like this will appear. It shows which drivers are checked and which are not. By pressing "Next", you can see other information about tested drivers:

2.2. As a result of checking the drivers with the utility Driver Verifier.exe it is possible that the system may fall out. When an error occurs while checking drivers, system errors and . Typical error codes and explanations are given below.

0xC1: SPECIAL_POOL_DETECTED_MEMORY_CORRUPTION
· 0xC4: DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION
· 0xC6: DRIVER_CAUGHT_MODIFYING_FREED_POOL
· 0xC9: DRIVER_VERIFIER_IOMANAGER_VIOLATION
· 0xD6: DRIVER_PAGE_FAULT_BEYOND_END_OF_ALLOCATION
· 0xE6: DRIVER_VERIFIER_DMA_VIOLATION

2.3. Examples of dump decryption by the program :

3. Useful links

So, you have a recurring blue screen of death, and like many BSoDs, it's because a bad driver is to blame. However, the screen does not give you the correct information, either because it does not contain any driver at all, or because it lists a system driver that is acting as false.

Driver Verifier is a free utility included in all versions of Windows from Windows XP. It literally checks each of the drivers on your PC until it encounters the problem that caused the problem, intentionally creating the same blue screen, but then recording the information in a log file to help you identify the problem.

Launch Driver Driver

If you're experiencing the same blue screen frequently and you'd like to get proactive and fix it, here's how to use Driver Verifier.

1. Click the button Start
2. Click " Execute"...
3. Enter CMD and press Enter.
4. In the new window, enter verifier and press Enter.

On Windows Vista and 7:

1. Click the button Start
2. Enter CMD in the field and click Enter.
3. In the new window, enter verifier and press Enter.

On Windows 8 and 8.1:

1. Press the key Windows + X
2. Click " Command Line (Administrator) (Windows PowerShell (Admin) in Windows 8.1)
3. In the new window, enter verifier and press Enter.

All Windows versions:

1. Make sure it's selected setting up user settings (for code developers) .
2. Click " Next» .
3. Select " Select individual settings" from the full list .
4. Click " Next» .
5. Deselect low resource system modeling And standby I/O requests. (These two cause unnecessary workload on your PC.) Make sure everything else is selected.
6. Double tap " Next» .
7. Select " Select driver names" in the list .
8. Click " Next» .
9. Select all drivers on this screen except those that say Microsoft Corporation under Supplier. It is very unlikely that a Microsoft driver is causing this problem.
10. Click " Ready" .

Note. If you can't complete the above steps because the blue screen keeps happening, try booting to .

At this point, you must restart your computer. Then try causing the BSoD again by doing what you did before. Windows adds extra workload to your drivers to help you. If you can't reproduce the BSoD, try running your computer overnight. Once the BSoD appears again, reboot your computer and read the Minidump file.

Reading a dump file

The Verifier driver will start, blue screen, and write a log file. This log file is located in C:\Windows\Minidump\. Read it and you will see which driver is causing this problem. Try searching for the driver name to see what piece of hardware your PC uses.

So how do you read it? You need a debugging tool, which you can download from Microsoft.

A . Download the SDK, install it, select debugging tools, and deselect everything else.

Please note that debugging tools for previous versions of Windows are no longer available; you will have to send the dump file to a Microsoft technician for analysis.

After installing it, find it on the startup screen. It's called windbg (x64). Launch it.

1. Click " File", then " Open failure" .
2. Go to C:\Windows\Minidump\ and open the .DMP file contained inside.
3. Look at the bottom of the resulting file where the line says " Probably caused". This is a good indication of which driver is causing this problem.

Fix driver

Update the driver associated with this hardware:

1. Click the button Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click " Switch to classic view"
4. Double click system
5. Go to "Hardware" tab
6. Click device Manager
7. Click " Update driver."

On Windows Vista and 7:

1. Click the button Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Double click device Manager
4. Find the device causing the problem
5. Right click on it
6. Click " Update driver."

On Windows 8 and 8.1:

1. Press the key Windows + X
2. Click Control Panel
3. Browse by small icons
4. Click device Manager
5. Find the device causing the problem
6. Right click on it
7. Click " Update driver."

Or use our application so as not to be confused with Driver Verifier. Driver Reviver automatically updates all existing drivers on your PC and is especially good at updating underperforming drivers like this one to the latest and greatest version.

After fixing the driver issue, you will want to disable Driver Verifier.

Disable driver verifier

Once you are done using Driver Verifier, you will want to disable it as it is quite hard on your PC while it is running.

On all versions of Windows:

1. Re-run Driver Verifier using the steps above.
2. Select " Delete existing settings" .
3. Click " Ready" .
4. Restart your computer again.

Bookmark this article for future reference so that whenever you have a blue screen, you can fix the problem. Also, check out our interactive and enter your error name for more tips on resolving your specific Blue Screen of Death. Good luck!

The Driver Verifier utility (verifier.exe) is designed to analyze problematic drivers when analysis of memory dumps after a BSOD does not allow finding the problematic driver. Driver Verifier is a “lifesaver” in the most problematic situations.

With Driver Verifier you can:

driver stress test (resource shortage conditions are simulated);

buffer overflow control;

control over errors that occur due to incorrect operation at a given IRQL;

I/O error analysis;

detection of deadlock situations, etc.

The Driver Verifier utility is very useful when:

the administrator (user) has suspicions that this particular driver is causing the system to crash and he wants to further check whether this is actually the case;

driver developers want to test their driver;

When analyzing a dump after a BSOD, it is impossible to find the problematic driver.

One of the most difficult cases of analyzing memory dumps is when a driver mistakenly overwrites data before or after the end of the buffer it allocated. In such cases, errors occur in the OS kernel (for example, analysis of a dump after a BSOD shows that the error occurred in ntoskrnl.exe).

Let's look at a similar case using a specific example. Using the NotMyfault utility, we cause BSOD - “Buffer overflow”.

The result of dump analysis using windbg is attached below.

According to the dump analysis we get:

1. Arg1: 00000007, Attempt to free pool which was already freed (an attempt was made to release an already freed pool)

2. IMAGE_NAME: ntkrpamp.exe (the core of the system itself has something to do with this)

It is with such errors that verifier comes to the rescue.

Launch verifier.

Select “Create non-standard parameters”. Next, select “Select parameters from list”.

Select everything except “Simulate resource shortage”.

Then select “Select unloaded drivers for this list” and specify the path to the myfault.sys driver, which is located in the same directory as the NotMyfault.exe program.

Then mark the driver and click “Finish”. After this, we need to reboot the computer.

We perform all the same actions as at the beginning. Run NotMyfault.exe, select “Buffer overflow” and click “Crash”. As you noticed, a crash may not happen immediately, since who and when will try to work with this memory is unknown in advance. As you can see in the image below, thanks to the verifier, the system can identify the problematic driver.

I will give an analysis using!analyze –v in windbg.exe of a memory dump after a BSOD.

The verifier program makes it so that the driver being tested, instead of ordinary memory available in the kernel, uses a special pool designed to detect such an error. Thanks to this, you can find the driver that causes the BSOD.

If we look at the results of the analysis, we see the following.

1. DRIVER_PAGE_FAULT_BEYOND_END_OF_ALLOCATION (d6) – this is one of the errors that is generated by verifier

2. IMAGE_NAME: myfault.sys – driver that caused the problem.

Thus, if analyzing a memory dump after a BSOD does not allow you to find the “culprit driver,” use the verifier.exe program (install all checks, except for lack of memory).

The simplest way to use Driver Verifier (verifier.exe) is to run it with the following parameters:

verifier /standard /driver driver file name

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